Defeat! sort of...

Well, the completely DIY approach to the CNC machine build is dead in the water. It turned out to be too difficult to schedule time between myself and Tom to work on the project. In addition, Tom moved out and had a baby, go figure. Do not fret, however, since I went a different route and am now the proud owner of a CNC machine that works.

I decided on buying a fireball v90 kit from probotix.com. It contained all of the hardware bits to move a router in 3D space. I also purchased a mount for a Porter Cable 7310 Laminate trim router as well as the router itself. Here's a video of the build process.

After construction, I had the motors, the motor controller and the physical machine which is enough to start cutting, but I wanted to make sure I did it right so I installed home and limit switches. Since the computer doesn't get feedback as to the position of the machine it has to sync up with the hardware. it does this by moving an axis slowly towards the 0 direction until it hits a switch. once this switch is hit, the computer knows the machine is at a particular position. The limit switches are there as a 'just in case'. The computer, once homed, knows to slow down and stop the motors if they are getting close to the machine's physical limits. The switches are there in case something is out of sync and the machine hits a limit anyway.

In hindsight, I think I made the right choice in buying a kit. The kit only provided the mechanical components that needed to have very tight tolerances which would have been very difficult to produce the way Tom and I were going to do it. That's not to say it would have been impossible, but for the price I paid vs. the time it probably would have taken, I think I came out way ahead.