TZ C-Beam Machine Plate Maker

An modified Ooznest kit. Modifications so far include:

• Y-Axis modification to hide the exposed screw, add rails for support and an aluminium tooling plate.
• X-Axis modification to hide the exposed screw and add additional v-wheels for stability.
• An additional base to house the electronics safely away from flying conductive aluminium chips.

The axis modifications make maintence much harder as the lead screw lock collars become basically inaccessible without taking the entire acutaor off the machine. For me, I find I need to perform much less maintenance due to the changes meaning very little contamination of the lead screws anyway.

Y-Axis Modification



The mod involves flipping the Y actuator over and replacing the build plate with a new one with some extrusion as stand-offs.

As the lead screw collars are almost against the extrusion after the flip, I found I had to file down the collar grub screws to prevent them snagging.

Making the extrusion stand offs proved interesting. Due to only having a hand mitre saw I decide to cut the extrusion to roughly the right size, threaded and bolted down one end then used manually entered g-code to mill the end flat and level. I then flipped the standoff over and repeated.





My electronics were originally based around a PiBot kit.

The drivers (rev 2.2 TB6600 based) seem very good. I had one driver die due to a soldering issue on the board and PiBot agreed to replace it FoC.
While I awaited the replacement I bought a CW5045 for £40 (3x the price of the PiBot driver). I must admit I may just not be experienced enough to appreciate the difference, but both seemed to perform exactly the same to me.

While the electronics of the PiBot ATMega based control board seem well done, it requires its own version of grbl firmware which is lagging behind grbl development. I've since replaced the PiBot controller with a basic Arduino Nano with a home built shield.



X-Axis Modification

This again involved flipping round the actuator to have the lead screw face away from the work piece. As with the Y, some filing of the collar leads screws was required for clearance. The filing doesn't seem to affect the function of the collar.

Additions

I've made a couple of additions that may be of interest. They have been made on the machine as initial projects.
The LED ring you can see around the spindle and an MDF collet & bit holder set that I've attached to the machine.



I didn't last long with Sketchup so I've ended up with my designs in Fusion 360 which is free for hobbyists and for me an incredible piece of software for both CAD and CAM.

The current state of the design can be viewed and downloaded here