My home made cnc machine, no z axis (waiting on a stepper) but did my first run on paper, what a feeling when it actually works!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVU1BCSKzaI
Looks like the maximum acceleration on the steppers is a little low but hell, its working! Fix the Z, add some limit/home switches and start making parts to make it better! I LOVE this hobby 
@John_Scherer
It looks like he had switches on it to me. The lead screws look like all thread. That will be their biggest impediment to getting decent speeds. Acme rod has gone through the roof lately. Today ball screws might be the better value? I never thought I’d ever say that. I am interested in belt, and chain drive anymore too.
You are correct @Paul_Frederick . I didn’t catch them. I’ve have a decent surplus market here in San Diego and even LA if I want to drive up to that nonsense, so most of what I do is surplus rather than new. I say that but both of my current machines are made from part from Openbuilds.com.
@John_Scherer
Do you have any other pictures of the machine you are running here? I could not get a very good look at it in the video.
Have you tried out ChiliPeppr to run it?
Great feeling the first time it moves.
Had some questions about the assembly of what is there, mostly a dumpster dive of parts salvaged from old scanners, I used 3/4 plywood begged from friends and a reconditioned power supply which I will be replacing with an atx power supply. An arduino uno and a cheap ebay grbl board take care of running the servos. My x and y axis are both belt drives (scanner original parts) and skip if I exceed travel. I have a gear reduction stepper coming for the z axis on a slow boat from china. This project has been mostly lessons learned along the way and many more to come. I will do another video once it is fully assembled and operational. I tried using GRBL 1.1 and couldn’t seem to get it to work right. Went back to version .9j and it works fine, need to set up limit switches and figure out homing. Thanks in advance for any help coming my way as I am quite new to cnc.
@Todd_Morrill
GRBL is not real motion control software. At least not in the sense that it has any kind of physics model used in trajectory planning. I use LinuxCNC which is a fully featured motion controller. What kind of motors do you have? You say servo, but are they steppers?
I would encourage you to throw Linuxcnc on a computer and give it a try. I use an old corr2quad computer and it great. Yes it’s learning curve is initially steep, but it’s doable. It’s also very configurable - maybe to a fault, but that’s what I like about it.
@John_Scherer
What learning curve? The way the LinuxCNC crew has it setup you boot the image, and it runs. It only gets hairy if you want to do something out of the ordinary. In my view though a simple 3 axis stepper machine is trivial to configure using the supplied Stepconf wizard.
Well, you also do need to run on a good candidate machine too. One that doesn’t have some deep seated issue that LinuxCNC has troubles with. AMD video cards, and some Intel CPUs can be problematic.
@Paul_Frederick Most people that I encounter shy away from LinuxCNC because they have some notion that being Linux based it will be complicated. Most I find are windows folk who haven’t looked at a Linux distribution in 5 years an seen how far they have come. They are comfortable in that environment and moving to something like LinuxCNC is scary and an unknown that they should avoid at all costs. This isn’t a notion to which I prescribe, just one I see propagated throughout the Internet, unjustly in my opinion.
I think it can be intimidating for some, but I also believe that the rewards it brings are worth it.
This isn’t a notion which prescribe to, just one I see propagated throughout the Internet, unjustly in my opinion
Its true that one can get a basic stepper or even servo a config up and running without delving into some more manual configuration techniques with LinuxCNC, but once your willing to lift up the skirt (so to speak) there is no end to what you can achieve with it. It really is a remarkable piece of software.
@John_Scherer
I don’t do anything too tricky with LinuxCNC. I just run my machine with it. That to me is good enough. I think most people have dedicated PCs for their CNC anyways. So I don’t see how the interface matters to them. Is it really that bad? I’m used to it I guess.
I am a firm believer in anything that works is what you need. If you want to upgrade then that’s an option, I am using universal cgode sender since it is fairly simple to operate and have it installed on both my Linux and my windows laptops, same interface for both systems. My Linux box is pretty much obsolete equipment and it runs Linux just fine. I might upgrade to stand alone system eventually but for now this is fine!
@Todd_Morrill
OK thanks. I must have heard servo someplace. Lots of folks are starting to run servo motors now. Because stepper motors have their issues surrounding them. But stepper motors are so dead simple to control, I like them myself for that alone.
I am ok to start out simple and slow, fast and complex is down the road. I will work on mastering my skills first before getting in deeper.