ah you thought i meant a wireless router
like for the internet get your mind out of the deep web
today's video is about our fancy new cnc
router that i hold on i know what you're about to
say i will admit that here at Linus tech tips our track record for maker type
projects isn't exactly pristine
but the point is we want to get better now we could spend
years honing our craft making mistakes
learning from them and eventually becoming masters at working with our
hands but instead of doing that we're going to
build a robot to do all the difficult machining for us so here it is this is
our four foot by four foot cnc router
that cnc router part sent over to us and we're gonna walk you guys through
how to build it and how to use it to do really cool stuff like make this memory
express is the go-to place for your electronic needs and services in canada
and they're opening a new store in victoria bc they're hiring for all
positions so check them out at the link in the video description
so here we've got 13 boxes that's maybe what like a ton worth of crap
and we're gonna have to make all of that using
a 244 page document and in the end hopefully we'll have a
fully functional cnc router
i guess we'll just start now
they call this the industrial erector set and i don't know anyone who's an
engineer definitely gets 80 20 boners so it makes sense
this must be for the gantry that thing is huge
so once this is tightened down on there that is not going to go
anywhere at all putting the router table together is
pretty straightforward thanks to the excellent included instructions you just
join the extruded aluminum together using the anchor fasteners tighten them
down and then repeat what feels like 10 000
times extruded aluminum is actually great for
machine frames because you can create extremely strong joints without giving
up modularity so compared to a welded steel frame if we decided in the future
that this router wasn't quite big enough for our needs expanding the bed is
relatively simple this table is so
freaking sturdy like holy crap i can like
this thing is not going anywhere at all
i guess that's why it's called the pro version holy crap
precision linear rails are added to the sides of the table to give an excellent
bearing surface then to make sure they run smoothly we just need to add a
little bit of grease yay the gantry holds the spindle and moves
around above whatever we decide we want to cut
so from here we added the stepper motors and we were basically good to go
mechanically onto the electronics
so you guys have seen computer power supplies before but look at this guy
holy crap so i'm just making this up
because i don't actually know what everything is but i'm guessing that these two are
power supplies we've got a board here that's going to
be the controller that goes to your computer
and each one of these is a stepper motor
or it'll be an output to a stepper motor so we'll connect one to each one of
those and they probably take fairly high voltages i'm not totally
sure but this power supply right here is for
one motor only and it's good for
2200 watts that's wow there's not even a whole lot in
there that's crazy that they can get all of
that power in that small of a thing
oh god that's heavy
so this is going to be the real business end of the
cnc that's good for three horsepower and 24
000 RPM oh
okay okay hey don't don't be a show-off i don't want you hurting yourself jeez
yeah we're gonna have to move it too that'll be fun we're gonna need like six seven people
to move this like comfortably oh yeah it's not gonna be a great time
this end's not so bad but like is this all manual assembly like every
one of these plates yeah
how are their instructions really good i guess we should probably close that door
everyone's being loud yeah guys we're filming here
yeah the spindle on its own has a 2.2 kilowatt power supply
what holy crap so to put that in perspective
this motor consumes more power than even the
beefiest gaming rig including its monitor and peripherals
i'm gonna hit it and see what happens
it's alive is this wood here because we're
sacrificing it or no it's just a table this is okay
really this is a table i would never have known that you had a
table based on how many of the tools
for this project ended up on the ground
there's a little light that's turning on on this okay that's good i guess
so the sensor is definitely working but i don't know if it's inputting into that
i was like oh it'd be nice to see this stuff a bit big
no so it turns out that if all we wanted to
do was turn it on there was a switch that we needed to flip but that wasn't
our biggest problem anyway so basically what we're doing here is i
was an idiot and put the spindle and the whole gantry
assembly on the wrong way so when it homes over here it's like a good foot
off the table so we need to pick up this whole piece
right here and flip it and that's why we have four
dudes okay so one person just stop it
from tilting all right that looks like me all right
picking up the feather the feather forward okay all
right do the twist which way anti-clockwise
okay so i think me and john are going to have to hold it and you guys will have
to go under oh my god
okay watch fingers everybody
now that everything is assembled correctly time to fire it up so now that it's all
working let's take a look at our finished router now i'm sure many of you
haven't seen one of these things in operation before
how the heck does it cut things how does it get to one
thousandth of an inch of cutting resolution basically
code is sent from the computer here and then executed by the stepper motors
which you'll find here here here and
over there so those are the ones i alluded to earlier now
a normal dc motor will rotate continuously when a voltage is applied
more voltage means more faster which is great if you just want to go
but it doesn't give you any control of the position
stepper motors contain a stationary magnet attached to the output shaft with
magnetic windings all around it so by energizing these electromagnets the
internal magnet is attracted and aligns with them to move the motor one step the
next set of electromagnets gets energized moving the shaft however far
it is between electromagnets so our stepper motors have 200 electromagnets
meaning that each full step is 1.8 degrees
then that resolution can actually be doubled with half steps so that's where
two electromagnets are energized to have the shaft move only half as far and then
beyond that microstepping which relies on multiple electromagnets at different
ratios can be used to further increase
our resolution all of that lovely precision can be ruined though and very
quickly by bad gears so right here we
have a 3.2 to 1 gear reduction to increase our torque from five foot
pounds to 16. this allows us to remove
more material at a time but anytime there's gears involved
backlash can quickly become an issue so backlash is the slop between two gears
that causes a loss in precision when you reverse the direction experiencing
something like this once in a run might only result in a couple thousandth of an
inch of accuracy being lost but on a machine that will normally be changing
direction hundreds of times while making a part
all of those little errors would really add up so to combat this our gears are
actually pre-loaded with a high stiffness spring right here this
smashes the gears together preventing them from shifting about willy-nilly now
of course our previous explanation of the instructions come from the computer
wasn't exactly the best so let's take a closer look at where those
come from because it's not quite as easy as just hitting
go like on a 3d printer for some of our parts we'll use solidworks and hsm
express to create the cad and toolpaths but we will also be using vcarve pro for
other parts due to its greater ease of use in the software we end up having to
define many parameters like how fast the
router will cut for example we have to do this because
well think about if you were using a handsaw
you'd actually find yourself adjusting how fast you move your blade how hard
you press and all kinds of little things intuitively based on how it feels
but the thing is that this robot isn't going to back off if something's amiss
and it will happily destroy a cutting tool or anything else in its way if you
don't program it correctly that's actually one of the reasons that they have built-in safety stoppers that we
have to wire up before we start doing anything so to make sure this doesn't
happen the correct RPM for the cutter and how fast the spindle moves has to be
calculated based on the force of the cutter from there those instructions are
compiled and sent to the laptop that's connected to the router
now down here we're running what's called mach3 which directly interfaces
with the router and runs gcode a programming language for cnc machines
and because this has all been pre-set up we should actually be able to just hit
go once we are of course fully clear of the machine
so right now what we're doing is we're giving it a known
zero height is that correct yep okay cool
i only know about these what my neighbor told me during scrapyard wars 2. next
time it goes past and here it's going to be taking about a thou off so just clean
this up are you ready yep boom
i don't think what you're doing is really helping
you might as well just get that out of there
this poor laptop well hold on hold on at least get a shot
of it if it's going to suffer it might as well all right go ahead
well no don't scrape it back over it doesn't seem quite so you go through
with the big bit yeah you get most of it done and then you come in and do the
fine details got it the smaller one beautiful so where's our smaller bit
uh it's in here
and this is safe to just go right in there yep that's considered
safe practice i want to make sure whatever we're doing in this video is what you're supposed to
do it's pretty close okay
yeah we definitely clearly need a better
material capture solution here so is this the last thing on your wish list
because this is one of the things you've been trying to get me to get since you
started a metal lathe would really top it off
and a tig welder we're at the point now where we can basically make anything out of acrylic
though oh yeah okay
or like any plastic like our dust collector is gonna be made out
of this guy oh okay wow uh that sounds heavy
is it considered safe for me to just reach in and grab this yep well you
can't pick it up i can't oh it's double-sided taped down yeah what the
crap uh okay i think we need to use not that
gopro tape because this is ridiculous
that stuff like how much did you use you could have used just like a tiny amount
of it the world's most spectacular
you put that much on yeah well i could have told you that was
gonna happen yeah it broke wait no it didn't it did
oh this is just some cleanup that we need to do
yeah you could have put like this much times four or five and it wouldn't have
gone anywhere and that my friends
is about how this whole thing goes down so it does take a little bit of cleanup
to get it uh to you know quite this
stage but surely you guys can kind of see how we get there so
we are to say we're really excited to make some crazy things with this would
be a gross understatement
we do still have a little bit of work to do before we can really go ham like
there's the dust collector that is highly necessary um we're going
to attach that to the cutting head and we're going to be making a spoil board
that goes on the table for easier mounting
but we're well underway and that's pretty much it for this so huge thanks
to nathan from cnc router parts for sending this guy over and to rod from bs
mods for giving us some extra advice and big thanks in advance to you
for the awesome suggestions that you'll be leaving in the comments for projects
that you guys want to see while you're at it by the way we actually need a name for our friend here
because uh that joke at the beginning of this video um the router video hahaha
get it well it's actually really confusing referring to this as the
router around here so the top upvoted name in the comments below we're going
to cut out a sign with that name we're going to mount it to the machine have
fun the massdrop xakg k7xx red edition
open-backed headphones featured their predecessor's legendary sound and build
quality which were both big hits with the audiophile community and some
additional tweaks the highs were boosted by an innovative flat wire voice coil
the mids were brought up to better balance the range and the lows were
raised by three decibels for an immersive sound this collaborative
design between mass drop and akg includes a custom ruby red colorway to
help the aesthetic really pop from the competition as well as a 10 foot detachable cable
check them out now at the link in the video description
so thanks again for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get
subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description
also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our
community forum which you should definitely join