well, as usual i've been thinking about this homemade cnc router thing. thinking about what i can work with and what i am most familiar with. conclusion is: why not make the structure, guide supports out of plywood rather than the typical alluminum channel? laminating some pieces of plywood together would readily give me a much stiffer setup than many of the pipe or aluminum chanel ones i've seen online. plus, plywood would be much easier to work with. steel or aluminum pathways for the bearings would make it as durrable and smooth running as anything else. ok, so i could make a 5' by 10' plywood framed homemade cnc xyz router table. being cheap, i'd be using all thread for my leadscrews. can i get 10' allthread? I don't know. do i want a 10' long table in my basement. it would never be able to get out, and its difficult to take full peices to the basement. so what to do now you say. ahh the answer is so obvious. make a shorter table but keep the ends open to allow a full 4'x8' sheet to be cut in parts. so now i'm down to a 5'x3' table, a much more manageable structure, and improved stiffness for the amount of material needed.

my favorite place to look at pictures of this sort of stuff:
http://www.kleinbauer.com/

they tend to follow the milling machine model of z movement for the cutter and x-y movement for the workpiece. i'd rather have xyz movement of the cutter and a stationary workpiece. i always figure, when choosing which tool to use that its better to move the smaller lighter piece. ex. when cutting plywood, use a circular saw not a table saw. same here, if your workpiece is bigger than a couple square feet, move the tool instead.

having the z mounted on the y mounted on the x requires an added amount of stiffness to keep things in line and to prevent binding. oh, and what do you know using plywood i think i'll have a stiffer setup.

word to the wise: if you're reading this and you're not me. good luck understanding any of this.

my current back burner no progress project is a homemade CNC router. i would like to be able to make model parts, circuit boards, and the like on said machine. So far i've got some stepper motors and controller chips from a couple of epson printers (thanks donald) and i've got an idea on how to control the chips from the parallel port. the software to control it is all floating around in my head. outputing to the parallel port will be a challenge. can't wait.

another back burner project is a custom made remote control boat, think chris craft, pretty wood nice finish plus rc guts from a plastic rc boat. i found a good nikko rc boat for the guts on ebay. it featured proportional steering and throttle and was listed as being brand new. well it wasn't brand new, it didn't even work. it clearly had been used in some diry water. it only turns left and the throttle is very spotty. well rain on my parade. now i'm not sure if the transmitter or the reciever is the problem, so i don't have much direction at all for poking around to fix it. i would like to get a similar boat for cheap to use its guts instead. back to the shelf with that.

oh, thats not it for back burner projects: there is also the homemade lcd video projector. this is another always wanted to do project. i've got the screen. i've got the lcd from a laptop. i've got a light. i've got some lenses. i can't interface the lcd to anything. darn compaq secret ribon cable wiring. the only hope i see for this project would be buying an lcd "monitor" so that there is no interfacing to do.

its a cold day in hell: i completed something. one of the three tv's needing attention has now been repaired. its a 27" sony with intermittent picture loss. using the tried and true poke at things with a non-conducting stick method, i was able to (in only two sessions) find and repair a bad solder joint. by find i mean remelt the solder on a bunch of connections in the area of concern.
now for the other two tvs: one needs an ic and some capacitors that were going to cost about $5 if i ever order them (hope i wrote that info down somewhere) and the other tv needs to be carried out to the curb.
warning! don't try this at home (the repairing tvs part, not the carying it out to the curb) why not? you ask. well first of all there are all sorts of ways for the tv to kill you: deadly voltages exist in the tv even when its unplugged, oh and for those who say current is what kills you, theres enough of that in there too, the tv could implode if you break the back of the tube where its more fragile, (do note that imploding is not as safe as it sounds, once the shards of glass pass through the center, they'll continue on towards your flesh), and the tv could fall on you, and the tv could be repaired and then a kid could watch a violent show and be influenced to kill you, etc.
but the most important part of my warning, and this is something i've learned by mistake, trying to repair televisions tends to be a big waste of time.

a few shop related back burner projects:
portable miter saw stand with extensions
dust collection system, cyclone
wheeled tool chest, cart, worktop thingies
adding some outlets

so this site your looking at would also probably quallify as another back burner project. but if any of the above start to progress i hope to post appropriate updates here.

well thats quite a post for me. thanks for reading!

howdy
not too much here yet