CNC Mini Mill #12: Streamlining Tool Changes

It’s been a while since the last mini mill post. I’ve taken the table off a couple of times to clean out chips that get in under the gibs and re-grease the ways, but it should be clear from the relatively large number of posts of stuff actually made with it that it’s been running really …

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CNC Mini Mill #11: A little more work on the air spring

It seems like every time I conclude with saying the mill is now operational, I realize there’s something else I want to improve. After making the new air spring bracket, I finally wanted to fix the air spring scraping against the inside of the column. This would require making a new bottom mount for it, …

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CNC Mini Mill #10: A better air spring bracket, and some tweaks

As I mentioned in the last post, one of the things I wanted to make was an improved bracket for the air spring that takes some of the weight of the spindle. The stock bracket is a ~300mm long, 10mm diameter steel rod, mounted with two M6 screws on the side of the spindle, threaded …

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CNC Mini Mill #9: Spindle and coolant control

With the limit switches working, it was time to tackle the spindle control. The spindle is normally controlled with on/off switches and a speed knob on the spindle itself, but for CNC use it’s useful to have the ability to run the spindle from the G-code. I ordered a “CNC spindle control kit” with the …

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CNC Mini Mill #7: Another kind of shield

After talking about the ill-fated Arduino shields, here’s something more pedestrian. Whenever I’ve used the mill, I get chips everywhere and they get dragged into the house. It also feels a bit sketchy using the Superfly cutter without any kind of protection, since if the insert holder were to come loose it would go flying …

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CNC Mini Mill #6: The Arduino shield

In the post that talked about how I burned out the Arduino, I concluded with the need for a dedicated 48V-to-12V converter that would supply power to the Arduino but also to the coolant solenoid and various other things that might need 12V. Unfortunately a switching buck converter is a bit more complicated than just …

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CNC Mini Mill #5: Correcting the X-axis

In the previous post I talked about how the mount for the X-axis stepper motor in the CNCFusion kit didn’t line up the motor with the ballscrew axis. I realized that the clearest way of showing this was to bolt the motor mount directly to the thrust bearing mount. Any misalignment should then be obvious. …

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CNC Mini Mill #4: Small tweaks

In the previous posts I described the electronics box and motion controller. (Newsflash: The Arduino Due survived! There was only a shorted input capacitor. When I removed that, it worked again, and I so far haven’t found anything that’s really broken. Amazing, dodged another bullet there.) This post will focus on the physical mill setup. …

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