My friend and I enjoy building and competing at combat robot events, so when I visited him couple of months ago, I saw how easily he could go from his fusion 360 model to CNC machining HDPE in matter of minutes. So, as I want to have a liberty of fabricating the robot parts as efficiently and easy as possible, with different materials such as plastics, aluminium and steel in comfort of my UNI, for the first time I am designing my Computer-Numerical-Control machine called ArbeitsMaschine.

This CNC was inspired by Cody Lammer's one-of-a-kind CNC Mill (check out his video)! While no documentation was available for his design, the high level of interest around it motivated me to take on the challenge to reproduce it and open sourcing it to the community. My design follows similar choices with unique double y-axis driven nut with a twist on some the off-the-shelf components, electronics, and gantry geometry to match my local hardware suppliers.

Some of the specs:

• CONFIGURATION: 3-axis moving gantry (x,y1,y2,z) 
• WORKABLE AREA: 500x500x150mm
• MACHINE BASE: Epoxy granite base with 90x90mm aluminium extrusions
• WEIGHT: 150+ kg
• STEPPER: 3x closed-loop NEMA 23 3 Nm, 1x closed-loop NEMA 23 2 Nm
• SPINDLE: 2.2 kW air-cooled ER20 spindle
• CONTROL: FluidNC controller