Eric Wiemers shared with us a post documenting the building of ThrAxis – Scratch-Built CNC Mill:
As it turns out, you CAN make a CNC machine on a shoestring budget! It just takes a lot of time, reading, effort, and… time.
The ThrAxis (Three-Axis) is a vertical milling machine made mostly from materials from hardware stores. The spindle is a Harbor Freight rotary tool and the motors and controllers are surplus and eBay finds. We made it during lots of late evenings using mostly handheld power tools and “garage precision”. It was a fun project for me to work on with my wife and it’s become a handy tool. I’ve found that it has accelerated my ability to realize my project ideas and has made it much easier to make things with the personal touch. We’ve made toys, art, and mechanisms and we have plans for much much more.
Why would you make a CNC machine in your shop? It seems like such a daunting job and what the heck would you do with it when you got it? These are the questions I heard when I brought up the ThrAxis to most people. They were right to question because it’s not an easy job. Since working on projects is what I do for fun, the doing and the why were a given for me, but I found it hard to explain. CNC machining allows you to make amazing things; things more precise, rapidly, numerous, and intricate than a person could make by hand. Of course you’re limited by a spinning tool and how far your machine can move, but it’s way more capable than a handsaw and a Dremel tool. My first inspiration was bloodying my fingers forever bending little 1/2″ long wires for RadioShack prototype circuit boards, then chemical etching circuit boards by hand (having only about a 10% success rate), and then spending $100+ on professionally-made circuit boards made me realize that there has to be a better way to get my ideas from breadboard to circuit….