Axminster SIEG Super X1 Micro-Mill Dremel Addon

More updates for the Axminster SIEG Super X1 Micro-Mill. In order to drill PCB's and work on some small engraving jobs we found that we needed a much faster spindle speed than the standard motor will allow. We purchased a Dremel 300 series drill kit which has a rotation speed up to 30,000 rpm.

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HTC Desire Dock / Wooden Stand

After buying an HTC Desire smartphone, I tried to find a suitable dock or stand for holding the phone while syncing and charging the phone. I ordered one from ebay over 3 weeks ago but the seller has let me down and hasn't sent it.

After looking for a suitable material to make a Desire dock from, we found a piece of Rosewood in the workshop 100mm x 100mm x 40mm high.

I purchased a 1m long micro usb lead with a right angle plug from ebay for £3.00

The new custom wooden dock was designed in Illustrator and then the cut paths generated and fed to Mach 3 on the CNC mill.

Video at end of post.

The top surface of the wood was machined flat before milling using a surfacing tool.

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Our original milling machine has undergone several modifications since we purchased it.

First was a new longer bed and then a diy CNC conversion with the control box being relocated, and in December 2009 we purchased a belt drive kit to make it quieter to use. This was followed by a RPM monitor a couple of weeks ago using a optical sensor.

The one thing the mill has always needed was to be made more precise for CNC milling and the original lead screws had too much play in the threads to enable us to work with small tolerances. We had planned to get ballscrews and ballnuts when we first did the CNC upgrade but they are very expensive to buy and had difficultly obtaining the sizes we needed.

Last week a pair of 8mm shaft ballscrews with 18mm ballnuts appeared on ebay for under £100 so we purchased them to upgrade the X and Y axis on the mill. We will upgrade the Z axis later but we are looking into alternatives for the current cast iron column and runners.

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When we purchased the milling machine which was later converted to be CNC we also purchased a Axminster SIEG C1 Micro Lathe, the lathe was ok for working with larger materials (over 3mm) but due to excessive vibration from the machine when it was running it wasn't possible to work smaller materials and get a consistent finish.

Recently we needed to make some small parts on the lathe and found that it wasn't possible so we decided to see if we can improve it!

Removal of the covers and replacement of various parts narrowed the source of the vibration to the standard pulleys which had over .5mm offset which caused a lot of issues and the motor mount which flexed a lot when under load.

The original machine before starting work.

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DIY CNC Mill Controller for Stepper Motor Milling Machine

This addon to our CNC mill was made to allow manual control of the mills cnc stepper motors using a pair of 2 axis joysticks obtained from a broken radio control plane radio transmitter.

The circuit uses a 12 series PIC processor to sample the joystick position and determine a center point. This then sends one output to the mills motor controller for the direction which switches between 0V and 5V via a optical isolator and the second output from the PIC Processor gives a voltage which corresponds to the joysticks position between 0-5V which goes into a voltage to frequency chip which sends a pulsed output to the mills motor controller for the speed. This is also isolated using a a optical isolator to protect this new circuit when the PC is controlling the mill.

The finished hand controller with the 2 joysticks which came from a old RC plane controller.

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After moving my monitors around on the office desk to make way for some new kit, I found that the best place would be if one of the screens was fitted flush against one of the brick walls in the office.

I made this VESA compatible monitor mount from a single piece of aluminum plate after seeing the commercial ones have a much larger standoff than I needed.

Materials Used: 1 x 120 x 120 x 6mm aluminum plate
2 x 4" screws (countersunk)
2 x brown wall plugs

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Using 6mm thick flat aluminum bar, we made four brackets which were attached to the chimneys either side of the house and between these, two lengths of 25mm x 4.2m square aluminum bar were fitted to act as supports for the solar panels.

The photo below shows the brackets fitted to the western end of the house.

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Custom 5th Scale RC Bike Project

The development of a custom built 1/5 scale radio controlled electric motorbike using a carbon fibre chassis and adjustable pivot suspension unit.

The design was made using adobe Illustrator and the main parts were cut on a custom made CNC milling machine and other parts hand made or using a mini lathe. Custom Thunder Tiger Chassis

This was my first attempt at making a rc bike chassis using carbon fibre was for a Thunder Tiger Electric RC motorbike. The original frame panels were scanned and then traced in Adobe Illustrator. I then modified the layout of the panels to reduce weight and then exported them for cutting on our milling machine. The chassis is approx 75g lighter than the original alloy version but it is a lot stronger.

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