So lately I’ve been tying up my X-carve 1000 on small 1.25" x 1.25" ring blanks for a online ring business I started a few months back. Needless to say I didn’t expect to do the amount of business i’m doing. In any case tying up my big machine and having to keep running downstairs into the garage for the machine was a waste.
I wanted a small machine that was quiet and would fit in a small desktop sound proof case. The 500mm was too big and you really can’t make it smaller without redesigning the wide carriage for the z axis, The Carvy and the Nomad where nice but way overpriced for my needs and budget.
I found this cute little Chinese kit from Elkesmaker, it was the perfect size, nice rigidness and can easily be modded to aluminum parts cut on the X-carve if needed. The problem was this ridiculous little motor it comes with (see picture below) so after a little modding i should just be able to fit this 500w quiet cut Chinese spindle with it (the biggest issue in redesigning it was the long collet on Chinese spindles but I figured it out.
It’s Grbl powered which made it nice when wanting to use Easel or UGS etc… Remember these are easy round cuts being made anyway from a 1/2" piece of wood. Well after redesigning and testing i’m getting great results! I added a some pics of the machine and spindle upgrade and a quick video of the maiden cut.
4 Likes
Hello. Why don’t you use a bigger blank and cut several rings on your xcarve instead of making them 1 by 1? That would save you the trouble of running downstairs all the time.
The rings are custom to the species, size, width, etc… So cut many at a time would just be a lot of pieces hanging around that may not be used for a while and then each would need to be labeled for size etc it’s a lot more work that a 1 min cut as needed.
2 Likes
So after the initial testing, I found I wasn’t getting perfect round cuts and it would drift when changing tool paths. I took off the little all in one arduino motor board combo and hooked up my original arduino and Gshield i had laying around from when I replaced it with the controller box I built for my x-carve awhile back. Now I hooked up a 24v power supply instead of the 12v that the original board could handle and had some torqued up custom wound nema 17 in the house, Well definitely did the trick! of course its louder than the original 12v, so now I just need to config the steps for the new motors before getting started on a nice small sound proof cabinet (keyword small). Funny I had a feeling when I started this I was going to wind up tearing it apart and rebuilding it! BTW here are the rings I’ve been making on the x-carve that started this whole project if anyone’s interested http://brkncreative.com
2 Likes
