Re: Liberty4Ever's 2X4 CNC Router Build Log
Posted: Wed Mar 06, 2013 3:56 pm
yasam2002 wrote:Do you have a price list for the components of this beautiful cnc machine?
I cheated and bought the heavy duty router kit, ready to screw together.
Currently on eBay by signal-seeker, the designer and manufacturer:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/261172736081
It's currently listed as US$2700. It might have been $100 less when I bought it two months ago. I asked for it without the motors and electronics, so the seller reduced the cost by $200. My parents are close to the seller, so I stopped by and picked it up to save on the shipping and packaging costs.
I've probably spent $350 or so on the motors and electronics. I upgraded to the largest NEMA 23 stepper motors I could find. It seemed a little underpowered for the beefiness of the mechanical components. Extra speed would be nice, but mostly, I wanted to be able to make relatively deep cuts in harder material and remove more material without losing steps.
The mechanical kit seems complete, and I already had most of the wire and incidentals needed to wire it. I bought a metal cabinet at Sam's Club to use as a low cost electrical panel. I need to buy a subpanel for it to make wiring more convenient. I'll probably buy an aluminum table to screw to the extruded aluminum frame to place under the spoil board to add rigidity to the frame. Once the mechanical part is assembled and the motors are installed, I'll design an integrated table to support the CNC router and a dust collecting enclosure that should also reduce the noise to a less offensive level. I may design a couple of 4 foot fluorescent lights into the top of the CNC router. I like a lot of light.
I decided not to use a recycled Craig's List computer this time, and bought a nice Intel D525MW motherboard that's known to play nice with LinuxCNC, and a power supply and a 60 GB solid state hard drive and a couple of sticks of RAM to max out the memory... so I can watch YouTube videos while routing - HA! Actually, the big RAM memory is so Linux shouldn't need to use the swap partition on the solid state drive and prematurely wear out the flash hard drive. I have maybe $200 in the PC components.
Those prices were from memory, and are approximate. I'm keeping accurate records. When the project is fully assembled, I'll post an accurate accounting of the cost, and include a bill of materials with costs for the various subsections.
It's definitely possible to build a less expensive CNC router. My goal wasn't the absolute lowest cost this time. I wanted to be on the high end with regard to quality (accuracy and long term reliability), but of course cost is always a consideration so I did seek a good value solution.