A few wee upgrades to the CNC Shapeoko 2 1. z axis knob 2.

A few wee upgrades to the CNC Shapeoko 2

  1. z axis knob
  2. Fan for the stepper drivers. Still need a box!
  3. Clear perspex rail covers. To stop all the debris getting under the rollers and causing gitters ruining the work.
  4. A newly designed and laser cut waste board with integrated M6 nuts.
  5. Same with the hold down clamps.
  6. The Dremel died and went through a piece of work!! So I could not use the CNC to make mounts for the Makita 700c so laser time! Pulled an all nighter to design and build a ‘Tactical’ mount to get things going. But need to get the Z axis upgrade (or build it :wink: and make some metal mounts.

Things to do
A. Z Axis upgrade to NEMA 23 and behind mount. In fact Nema 23’s all round.
B. Box for the electrics
C. Decent fan!
D. Skirt for the vacuum mount.
E. Cable drags.
F. Side gripping work holders.
G. Metal Makita mounts.

Also musing with the idea of upgrading the electrics and driver for an industrial level unit. What would be good to use with V Carve Pro? Any experience with that? I having varied results with the NC outputs from V Carve and then GRBL controller. Anybody found the best software to use with GRBL 0.8c. Also looking to upgrade to GRBL 0.9.
I use Coreldraw 7 to design in. Any ideas or feedback appreciated. It is driving me mad this week with everything being nearly there, but not quite. I have a three tool job that runs for about an hour. Then one of the GRBL commands are not recognised and the tool goes off in a direction with a mind of its own!! Half the time through the work :frowning:

6 steps forward 2 Back :slight_smile:

I know inkscape will generate Gcode. There was a post in the past week or so that mentioned a CAD/CAM package that might work for you.

Autodesk fusion 360 is an excellent full featured 3d CAD CAM package for free. Just register and you are in business. I tried and is impressed.

I experienced that GBRL is not stable too. I have seen rare weird behaviour when running GRBL with mach3. I’m going internet smoothstepper now. Just got it and need to install it.

I would really recommend giving http://chilipeppr.com/grbl a try. Used with both 0.8 and now 0.9 and it works really well.