A Home Built capable CNC built on 3D printing.
The MPCNC is an open-source, mostly-printed, DIY CNC platform. The design was built by V1 Engineering, but mainly by a guy named Ryan Zellar who came up with the idea. The designs, code, parts lists, all of it was his idea to be able to share opensource with the community. Wanting a large platform capable CNC of my own, but not having thousands of dollars to spend on one, this was a good option for me and greatly exceeded my expectations.
While my build was mostly just a verbatim build based off of the documentation of the MPCNC, I still wanted to share it here as a testament of how printers just in PLA can create real stressed parts like the ones on this CNC. Furthermore, I had a great time pushing the limits of this machine.
The original footprint that I had chosen for this machine was a working area of 300mm x 300mm, as I was determined to have a machine capable of cutting aluminum, which comes down to a factor of rigidity. The smaller your footprint, the more rigid your machine. However, some time after I had initially built it this way, I changed it to approximately 12” by 36”, a much bigger footprint.
Interestingly, I didn’t see a huge change in the rigidity of the machine – it could still cut aluminum just fine. With this machine I cut everything from foam to soft wood to hard wood to delrin (or any plastic really) as well as aluminum sheet. I didn’t have any aluminum thicker than .25” sheet, but it seemed to still work fine for me, provided you went slow enough.
I won’t go into all of the details of the machine here, as you can see those over at V1 Engineering’s page, but just to showcase a cool project with some pictures. Enjoy. :)
