March 19, 2005

Laser CNC machine - home built!

Browsing around various machining sites and ran into this gem. This guy gets a CO2 laser from eBay and proceeds to build a CNC (Computer Numerical Control) cutting machine with it. The laser is stationary and the work moves. As he says, getting the laser was the easiest part... Heh... Lots of technical details -- hardware and software (Linux natch...) Posted by DaveH at March 19, 2005 9:26 PM | TrackBack
Comments

http://www.torchmate.com/cnc.html

This is a kit for a CNC gantry on which you can mount various heads such as a plasma cutter or laser cutter. You control with a PC. You build your own table and rails.

I haven't tested one but I've used others of its ilk and it sounds similar. You feed it dxf files so if you are already an AutoCAD user you can export your designs to it. It generates the g-code from the dxf. In my experince only a subset of line types are supported, plines but not splines, and you have to be careful about open objects.

I've heard of people mounting other heads on them such as routers to also work wood and they even show an example of mounting a MIG gun to do welds.

I think a moving gantry would be better than a moving table since there's less stuff to move around and there would be less chatter and vibration to affect accuracy.

On sale for $3K

Posted by: back40 at March 19, 2005 11:42 PM