A Mill

Last month I finally bought a small milling machine. The particular model is a Taig 2019-CR, made in the USA. It's a bare CNC mill; there are three stepper motor mount points. You attach your own steppers (I got three of these NEMA 23 steppers) and a controller and it's ready to mill.

While I don't know much about milling machines, I like to think I can recognize a healthy Open Source software project. grbl is a stepper driver for Arduino that translates G-code, the universal language of machine tools, to properly coordinated multi-axis stepper motor movements. They also make a very nice Arduino shield that can drive the steppers, the grblShield. Plugging all these together with a 24V power supply gets you a small milling machine driven by open source software, built from branded components. Here's the setup just after it came to life.

Behind it is the control electronics. At the top is the 24V supply, connected to the grblShield. There's an Arduino underneath it talking to the PC over USB, and that's all there is. grbl has a companion GUI controller that works very nicely, bCNC, and it worked flawlessly.

So much for the setup. What can it do? Well, it can cut metal parts out. Here's a small wrench I cut from aluminum plate last Saturday morning.
This is just the beginning, obviously. There's something very satisfying about seeing metal parts emerge slowly from the machine. The advent of CNC means that being comfortable with software gives you a head start as a machinist. I'm using the Python computational geometry package shapely to generate these tool paths, and CAMotics to preview before the cut. A little bit of coding goes a surprisingly long way!



If you're at all interested in machining, I recommend CNC Milling in the Workshop. I fact I read it shortly after making my first cut, but I really wish I'd read it before!

More metal parts soon. Thanks for reading.