Bee the Boss

I began the planning stages stages in December 2018, as I knew it will be months before the space in my cellar is ready to begin the build. Need to repoint granite block. pour foundation footings under existing granite walls, and pour the rest of the floor.

Meanwhile, I'm Working on the design for the Boss in my spare time.

I decided on a Water cooled spindle because of the lower sound level, and the speed control it achieves. Besides they look real sweet! I'm going over the top on cooling the spindle. I plan to have a radiator to cool the water with flow and temperature monitoring, as well as variable speed temperature controlled fans. These three fans will also pull air through the electronics cabinet. One will run whenever the VFD is in Run mode, another will activate based upon coolant temperature, the third will operate based upon electronic cabinet temperature.

I have spent an unbelievable amount of time trying to research and interpret the chenglish manual that comes with the VFD. I spent weeks reviewing the manual I found online, thought i was done, but when the VFD arrived, it came with a slightly different manual and some setting were different, so i'm going back through it all again. I'll post the spreadsheet that contains my settings and notes.

For the wiring, I'll be going all out as well. Many have used unshielded wire with success, but I have also read comments where machines do unexplainable things in the middle of a cut. Cross talk between control and motor wiring could be the cause but would be very difficult to troubleshoot. The 400Hz spindle will cause a ton of electrical noise, the stepper motors themselves operate at high frequencies and could cause interference. I am going to shield everything to eliminate the possibility of problems.

It is now April 2019 and the cellar upgrade is progressing, I have now ordered all the parts for this build totaling nearly $4000 including software and parts to repair an old PC. Many parts are arriving daily as I finish my design, wiring schematics, work station and other details. also trying to resurrect an old PC that I had on hand to control this beast.


Repairing the old PC was harder than i thought, I had many driver issues and the machine was slow, I re-installed XP but now it is stuck with SP1 and won't connect to the internet. I was gonna use it as is, but in researching options I decided to add a smoothstepper to the build and take a lot of the burden off the old PC to increase the reliability of my setup. I then found a rebuilt PC win win 7 installed on amazon for $135,...Done.

It's May, and the Cellar upgrade is done, I've begun building the cabinets for the Work Bee so I think its time to publish this build. P.S. I keep adding features to the CNC as I wait to build it, plus the lumber for the cabinets, This Build just topped $5000.


Working on the adapter bracket for the spindle, trying to incorporate some tramming adjustment.fullsizeoutput_15b2.jpegfullsizeoutput_15b4.jpeg