CNC Mills and Routers

This page should be your starting page when starting to look at our CNC mills and routers. The CNC routers and mills have lots of things in common, all this will be explained on this page here. For machine specific information follow the links in the list below.

Currently we have 3 CNC routers and mills in the Co-Making Space

• Workbee CNC Router
• Kress CNC Mill
• Blackbox CNC Router

Basics

A CNC router is a computerized woodworking machine - basically a router mounted on a positioning system. While it may also be able to handle other materials than wood depending on the bits you use, a proper CNC mill is more precise for machining parts out of metals and other non-wood materials.

You can make furniture or even build a house. For more ideas, check out the CNC Milling Ideas.

To use this type of machine, you need to familiarize yourself a CAD/CAM program (e.g. FreeCAD, Fusion 360). There are lots of options what software to use, you need a CAD tool to design what you want to build later and you need some CAM software to translate that design into a file with machine specific instructions. Some software offers both together, other software can only do one. At the end of the day you need to have this instruction file, it is mostly called gcode file, some people use different names. File extensions can vary, e.g. .gcode, .nc, .tap. At the end of the day the file extension doesn't matter, the file can be opened in a text editor and is readable, don't worry too much about the file extension name.

Workflow

This is just an overview and does NOT replace the personal introduction!

1. Create the tool paths in a suitable CAM software (e.g. FreeCAD, Fusion 360)
2. Secure your workpiece on the machine's bed
3. Insert the appropriate collet & bit as defined in your tool paths
4. Home the machine, jog to your work piece origin and zero your work coordinates
5. Upload your generated G-Code
6. Put on personal protection
7. Run your Program
8. Be ready to hit the Emergency Stop in case SHTF. Your Program is running!

You should consider to mill your code "in the air" first, meaning well above your work piece. With that you can see if the code causes some issues at some point. That can happen quite easily especially if you are having a piece which is getting close to the maximum size the machine can handle. gcode is not scanned from the machine upfront, the out of bounds error might come only up after you have milled 80% of your job.

Spoilboard

Depending on the job you want to route on the CNC router/mill it might make sense to use a spoilboard. Some machines have a spoilboard typically mounted, some others don't. When ever you need to cut through the material you typically go little bit deeper than the material thickness. How much depends on the machine and your work piece. A not well leveled spoilboard in combination with a larger work piece leads to a bit more depths to be on the save side. Another option is to use a vice if you need to cut through and have a rather smaller work piece.

Dust Extraction

Make sure to turn on the available dust extraction before you start your milling job, but only if you work with timber. If you are milling metal, then don't use dust extraction. Metal can get extremely hot and set the vacuum cleaner of fire.