Introducing the 1610 mini CNC project
This project is about building a small, desktop CNC milling machine. We started out purchasing a very inexpensive kit for about £120 from ebay with the idea of then adding features and improving the reliability of the machine. In particular we set out to:
- improve the safety aspects of the machine, building a case to surround the machine, adding in some kind of extraction system and adding an emergency stop button
- adding some machine controls to start, hold and resume the machine
- adding in endstop switches to x,y and z-axes
- upgrading the spindle to something more robust (we expect the first motor to burn out quite quickly)
- reducing vibration and noise in the machine by designing in some damping to the motor housing
- developing a system to level the bed
- develop open source documentation to enable replication and expansion of our developments (we’ve already started designing a larger version of this machine) – I may migrate this project over to GitHub at some point soon…
anyway, here’s the machine we started with…
