Anyone interested in designing/making/building hobby CNC machines?

Hi there,
I’m delighted to find a relatively local hackerspace at last, and I’m particularly interested in finding others who are keen on building/using/designing hobby CNC machines or stuff like that.
I’ve been building one for a few months now and have just got to the point of machining metal parts with it.
It’s arduino based, running GRBL using Grblpanel as a Gcode sender on a windows PC.
I’m using Camotics and CNCSimulator to simulate the gcode which I generate by running VBA scripts that I have written to process lists of features from cells in an excel spreadsheet and turn them into safe Gcode.
I’ve been posting videos of my CNC-machine development on youtube under the title DrunkCNC on my channel ‘dingolovethrob’. (please don’t be offended by the stupid Youtube channel name, it was named after a finger-puppet from another silly project).

Hi Pete,

I just came across this makerspace. Been looking into something like this for a while now.

I have been building snowboards in my garage until now and would be interested in using a 3-axis CNC going forward to remove the manual operations I currently perform and speed things up.

What are the parameters of your CNC? The cores I am looking into machining are +/- 1700 x 350mm.

Hi there, great to hear from you!
Unfortunately the machine I built is much too small for that sort of purpose, its bed is 300mm square and it can handle workpieces about 50mm high. I’m basically making circuit boards and fiddly little things like machining custom plates and brackets out of aluminium.
You’d need a machine like the X-Carve or something on that scale. I’ve seen them on you-tube and they look very good provided you don’t mind a lot of tweaking to get them set up right. There are quite a few reviews on there worth checking out.
I am presently collaborating with a friend who lives in Dorset who is building a somewhat larger machine as he wants to machine wood to make bits of furniture. We’re planning on using my machine to make the special brackets etc that he’ll need to build his.
Making a snowboard sounds like a heck of a lot of work, I can see why you’d be looking at CNC to speed things up…
You’d need quite a large machine for that work, firstly because of the size of the workpiece, but also because the machine has to be very stiff and so very sturdily built. If it’s not sturdy then the tool will chatter and you’d get very poor messy results.