I’ve been searcing and studing for a long time the DIY CNC world and for me it’s really amazing and exciting: the idea that you can immagine, design and creat a machine that actually builds accurate parts from wood, plasti or alluminum stock is absolutely incredible for me.

With that said you can do it in several ways and depends on how much you’re willing to spend on it buying an off the shelf product (for example an x-carve) and how much you’re actually interested in building stuff. For me the creativity part is the most important and even though I’d like to finish this project in one day I am goin to take the time I’ll need to study and do it properly.

First step therefore for me is to choose the linear motion system of the machine I am going to design and build. I decided to use then an SFU ball screw and an MGN linear rail. There are several different options you can use such as OpenBuilds V-slot or other kind of rails but at the end of the story i think they are much more complicated to design, assemble and probably less precise and sturdy.

Before to start my design process I decided to place a trial order of the following two parts to be sure of their actual dimensions. For example the ball screw nominal length is 1000 mm but i believe the effective length of the screw will be less than that. Unfortunately I did not find any MGN12 rails longer than 800 mm so I had to purchase what was available on the web. Then, once I’ll receive the parts, I will reverse engineer them by using a 3D CAD software such as FUSION 360.

• SFU1605 1000mm Ball Screw
• MGN12 800 mm Linear Rail

That’s really all for today.

Have a good Christmas eve.