Several years ago I purchased a Little Machine Shop HiTorque Mini Mill, a ball screw kit, steppers and controller, in short, all the stuff need to assemble a CNC milling machine. However, I never got it to the point of actually machining anything until recently. There are several reasons for that. One is that it took some time to figure out the kinks and get issues with the control software resolved. The other is that when I needed to mill something, it was easier just to do it by hand on my Sherline mini mill than do it with CNC. Also, I hadn’t found a CAM processor.
For those unfamiliar with CNC there are several stages to doing it. First, you design the part with a Computer Aided Design (CAD) program. Then the CAD design is processed with a Computer Aided Manufacturing program (CAM) that turns the design into instructions that tell the Computer Numerically Controlled (CNC) machine how to make the part. You can in principle program the machine in a language called G-code directly, but this tends to be error prone and works mostly for simpler parts. After looking at and trying various CAM programs, I finally discovered that Autodesk Fusion 360, which is a cloud based CAD program, also includes a CAM processor. Best of all, it is free for individuals and small companies to use.
While Fusion is in some ways easier to use than TurboCAD, which I have used for years, I found aspects of it frustrating, in part because it is so different from TurboCAD. So I imported my design into Fusion and then used the CAM processor to generate the G-code to run the machine. After a trial run cutting air, I was able to successfully drill 8 holes in my carriage plate with the CNC mill. I wanted to put a video of this here, but I discovered the free edition of WordPress doesn’t allow this. So until I decide I like this blog thing enough to pay for WordPress all you get is a picture of the CNC mill.
