Roy Aylett's blueChick CNC Machine

From Roy's excitement of finishing the build of his blueChick CNC machine, he submitted a few photos and a video to share. Roy added an nice little enhancement to the CNC machine, enclosed the electronics with a throughtful layout, and adapted a smaller router within the provided mounts.

From Roy:

Here are some pictures of my Bluechick v4.2 all built up I have spent some time and effort making the wiring as tidy as possible to enable the machine to function without any cable becoming snagged and it seems to work very well I have used 20mm flexible conduit for the most part.

The electronics are housed in a lockable metal enclosure that I had laying around and with the aid of the fan keep every thing nice and cool and neat. I still have to connect up the limit/home switches but they are mounted as seen on the pictures and i have just to connect them up also I have an emergency stop button which will be fixed in an appropriate position so as to be easily accesible whilst the machine is running.

The mill I am using is a Kress FME800 with variable spindle speed 800w motor perfect for my use as I will be mainly using the machine to cut balsa and light ply parts for my radio controlled model aircraft that I make.

Another little finishing touch that I came up with was to fill the routed Build your cnc logo with an epoxy resin with some red colour in it to give a nice effect. I have to say that i am very pleased with the finished machine it looks great.

Finished fitting the home/limit switches to the machine and have programmed them into the machine after a lot of head scratching and web searching. I eventually got them to ‘ref all home’. I tried them numerous times and all that happened was that the motors blipped very slightly and that was it. It turned out to be noise interference from the motors and or power cables. Anyhow, I eventually managed to overcome the problem by setting the debounce feature in mach3 to 1500 which has cured the noise for the moment but i will rewire the limit switches in screened cable in due course. I have taken a few pictures and another video for your enjoyment. Also fitted an emergency stop button see picture.