Since Corona was still around (May, 2021) , I had some time available to spend on other things than just work.
I already had an upgraded 3018 CNC-machine with a 0.5 kW spindle motor,
and a simple GRBL 3- axis board that works very well. But- it would be nice to make a CNC machine that can really work with aluminium and possibly also with copper and brass. I have already done some research in the past about what sort of CNC machine would be right for my goals. And the IndyMill CNC macine was already on my mind for over half a year. So-last week I ordered the manual and the steel plates
for the build and ordered some other parts from Ali. I also have quite a lot of parts on stock, from my 3d printer supplies. The Nema23- motors and the extrusion, motherboard, drivers, power supply, switches and probes are already available.
2021-5-09; First parts delivery for the Indymill: 3 ball bearing leadscrews with kit of end bearings and screw block holders, the frequency regulator 1 phase in, 3 phase out and the 1.5 KW 3 phase spindle of 3.6 kilograms
The required printed parts are being printed right now (early May-2021). I am printing all the upgraded STL’s, latest version as these are freely available on Thingiverse (just search for IndyMill) . And then you see the power of sharing: the design was already great, and with the upgrades it got even better. The upgraded versions of the mounts for the linear bearings are really a lot sturdier than the original design and the new endstop holders are very handy to have.
I roughly calculated the costs for building this machine and it was a lot cheaper than buying a similar CNC machine of this size. If you purchase wisely, the costs for all materials can be just under Euro 1000, if you follow the original BOM and including the 1.5 KW air-cooled spindle motor with regulator…
If you want to install another board than the standard Arduino UNO with the standard Arduino CNC shield, this can set you back an additional amount of 120 to 500 Euro’s. I use a FLY_CDY_V2 with Mellow’s original TMC2209 stepper drivers. DO NOT FORGET to set the switches on the underside of these steppers to ON if you want to use sensorless homing!
My add-ons to the original build:
Nema 23 stepper with the Closed loop kit
My solution for an enclosure ia a 84x78x45 cm flightcase
I started with a FLY_CDY-V2 reprap board to experiment with reprap CNC and the webinterface that has been developed for this setup.
This is achieved with smart dual homing of the dual Y axes, and gives me a lot more control on the machine. It is also already possible to just send GRBL-based Gcode to the USB port of the machine and use the reprap FLY board simply as gcode-interpreter to steer the machine. But for now I use the webinterface
to upload and run any gcode.nc CNC file, which works perfect!
Picture of the CNC-adapted and already available webinterface for reprap, especially tailored for CNC (by Sindarius, work ongoing):
Pictures are already published about this build!