My plan is to trace PDF files into DSM and output as DXF, or work up my own drawings. I have DXF to G code so I guess I could deal with your files. When finished, my OX will be used for all sorts, cutting aluminium is a must, Daughter has demanded name plaques for her horses stable, she reckons her horsey pals will pay for nice carved name plaques so who am I to argue! ply and balsa cutting will be essential and possibly light brass sheet, hence my first choice of the 900 Watt DeWalt router. I may well end up with an arsenal of spindles/routers and eventually a laser head. I am using the CNC shield for now but the intention is to use a Rumba board, a versatile Arduino mega 2560 based board with loads of output options more commonly used on 3D printers, I have upgraded 2 of my printers with them already. Like 3D printers, the options for modifying/tweaking are endless. I will be fitting endstops, but I may use TMC 2130 drivers, which do not need endstops, as soon as they detect a substancial increase in current they switch off. My Mk3 Prusa has them, certainly reduces the ammount of wiring! I have a notion to draw up some plans for a series of warship boats at rc able size, ie, 47ft Whaler, Skimming Dish FML Cheverton Launch etc, interesting boats but rarely seen actually on the water as working models. I have a milling machine so a plentiful supply of milling cutters is available for a range of jobs.

You seem to be doing pretty much the same thing as I am! I picked an eShapeoko whose mechanical kits are a fair bit cheaper, which meant I could afford the longer rails initially, but apart from that we are pretty much identical! Oh, and I'm using a different breakout board...

You will be adding limit switches? I find them essential for decent control, but also found it a bit tricky to get data on the best way to connect them to an Arduino. Does Ox provide an advised circuit and pinouts?

I see you are using DesignSpark. I don't think this accepts .DXF files, which are the standard 2-D interchange format. It will output them, but not import, which seems crazy to me! Which is a shame, because I could send you any of the model boat plans on the EeZeBilt or Marinecraft sites as a .DXF...

Most of the EeZebilts can be made on the cutting area you have, and all the Marinecraft. You don't need a powerful router to cut balsa - a model boat motor is sufficient, with a cheap Chinese cutter for a couple of quid. The great thing about that is that there is essentially no cutting noise, just the quiet hum of the motor.

A 4" wide plank with balsa edges will hold a sheet nice and firmly. What materials are you thinking of cutting? I am experimenting with cutting ply, and find that old dental burrs (which I got free from my dentist!) will go through 1/8" deal like butter powered by a Graupner Speed 400.

Hi. This machine is called the Ox, a full set of plates, anodised in black, is on sale at Oozenest at half price, I am building it bit by bit as I do not have funds for a kit. All parts are sourced in the UK, either from Oozenest, plates, extrusion some bolts and other Ox specific parts, Arduino Uno and CNC shield, the rest, Nema 23s, Toshiba motor drivers, bolts, some extrusions, 30 wheels, spacers etc from WE Do 3D Printing in Sheffield. Control will be via Arduino Uno and CNC shield, with Toshiba 5 amp drivers on a 24 volt PSU. This machine can be made as big as you want just by increasing the length of the extrusions, which consist of 20 x 80, 20 x 60, and 20 x 40 V slot. Mine will have a footprint of 750mm x 550mm, which will give me a build area of around 380mm x 650mm. Big enough for me, I have very little space and I am going to have to sell a couple of 3D printers to make room. I will be using GRBL firmware, Designspark Mechanical for design, DXF2Gcode for converting and Universal G code sender to cut. I don't anticipate needing a bigger machine as I cannot lift big models any more so 600 mm long will do me. I have not thought about work holding and my designs, If I manage to get ant sorted that work, will be there for anyone to use.I have not fully mastered the art of CAD yet, I learned Tech Drawing on a drawing board with T square and compass. This weekend will be a laugh as I am going to get the electrics sorted, I have mastered Marlin, used in 3D printing, and I have been laboring on the misapprehension that CNC would be the same, so it's teach meself GRBL time!
https://ooznest.co.uk/product/ox-cnc-aluminium-plates/
https://shop.wedo3dprinting.com/
Please note, I have nothing to do with the suppliers I have linked to other than as a satisfied customer...

That's a later version of the Shapeoko, isn't it? Tell us more! Where did you get it? What are you using for the electrics - an Arduino and GRBL? How are you going to do workholding? What size cutting area do you have? And are you going to put G Code out for any of the parts you cut?

Hi, I am in the process of building an Openbuilds Ox machine. So far I have built the gantry and Z axis. The drivers for the Nema 23 motors should arrive on Saturday so I can spend the bank holiday weekend fiddling about with the electrics. I will use a Dewalt 900Watt router for the spindle so there will be enough power to cut aluminium sheet. I have been using 3D printers tobuild a minesweeper with great success so a CNC router will add to mt arsenal...

"....I want one😊....."

Easy to obtain! In retrospect I bought one that was a little too wide for model boat use - it has a cutting width of around 15", while the next size down at 10" would have been fine for most purposes. But you really need the length. Perhaps I should have gone for the 55" rather than the 36".

This is probably the cheapest way to get a cutter of this size. But I suspect that the prices will be coming down all the time, and I look forward to the time when we can simply pass G-Code files to each other rather than plans...

I think you have done great, and I want one😊

The vacuum jig seems to hold items very well - but there is always a danger that something may be nudged by the cutter and then items cut inside it may be out of place... I found that leaving a few thou uncut keeps everything nicely in position.

The ragged edges seem to be caused by moving the cutter too fast through the wood when the RPM was low. They seem to have cleared up now that I am using 6-flute cutters instead or 2-flute.

I suspect that when I go to ply I will need to use a beefier drive motor and slower feed speeds - probably multi-pass as well. But I've completed a whole kit now and will put it together before moving onto ply or other hard woods.

One thing I would like to do is dump a log on the work area and carve a Streamlinia out of solid. But that will have to wait for a while.... 😊

Well done that man👍👍👍

This all sounds very familiar, I don't want to knock your project but be careful. I have experiance of cnc routers and laser cutters, laser cutters put no pressure on the material, its amazing how much side load a milling cutter puts on the material and can rip pieces out of the sheet. In the past i put strips of masking tape on the back of the material then held it down with double sided tape, this will hold pieces in place ( most of the time) Good luck

Having successfully used the machine to make the workholding support for the wood sheets, I started on the final leg - getting the machine to actually produce parts for a model boat. It's just going to be used for EeZeBilt balsa parts initially, until I understand a bit more about cutting tools and feed rates.

I'm not using a 'professional' spindle motor (which can cost well north of £100), but just an old model boat motor with a cheap Chinese chuck and milling head. You can see a couple of examples in the pictures below.

The first material I tried to cut was cardboard. I wanted something really weak, because the cutting tools are very narrow, and I did not know how much sideways force they would take. Turned out fine, though.

Further pictures show the first attempt at cutting balsa sheet, a whole sheet of 1/8 balsa being cut, and a couple of parts which have just been cut.

Points to make:

1 - you need a high RPM from the cutting motor if you want a fast feed speed. Boat motors work, but a high speed brushless would be better. As it is the edges of the balsa are a bit ragged...

2 - Probably the best way to keep all the parts in the balsa sheet is not to use tabs, but just to cut 90% of the way through. I left about 5 thou on the balsa part, which meant it stayed in place but could easily be pushed out...

3 - you need a soft surface under the balsa sheet in case you do cut deeper by mistake. I thought of felt but that gets caught up in the blade too easily. You could use another balsa sheet, but I used a bit of Correx. Depron would be fine...

So there we are. I have now cut a complete kit out of balsa and will start to make it up. I can recommend this machine if you want to just sit and have a beer while all the hard work of cutting parts is done for you...!

A word about the electronics and software build....

Each stepper motor is driven by a 'driver' - a little switching unit like an ESC. This does the business of sending the power to the motor coils in the right order. They are quite cheap - about £10 each.

To tell each driver to operate the motors in the right order you need a control box running the right software. You can use a dedicated laptop for this, running a stripped down system called LinuxCNC, but I opted to use an Arduino, which was the option advised by the vendor. So here is a picture of the Arduino (at the bottom - you can't really see it) with a breakout board on top carrying the four drivers (which have the little blue heatsinks on them). I made up an aluminium box to put them in, and attached it to the cutting gantry.

The Arduino runs a control program called GRBL. I take the plans I have drawn in DXF format, run them through some software called DXF2GCode, which turns them into G-Code, and then send that file to the Arduino via a USB connection using 'Universal GCode Sender'. All these items of software are open source and free to download.

The Arduino gets its power from the USB connection. The stepper motors get their power from a cheap Chinese 36v power supply, and the cutting motor gets its power from an old laptop power supply I had hanging around.

If electronics frightens you then you probably won't want to do this, but the skills needed to wire up a boat motor are really as much as you need to put it all together....

While it helps to be accurate, the final trimming of the work holder is done by the machine itself.

Here I am cutting the edges of the holder so that a sheet of 4" balsa will be neatly held. That's about 1.6mm wider than a 100mm sheet, so I will need a packing strip if I use the metric sizes. It's surprising how precise these machines are - I'm moving the cutter in by 0.1mm each pass, but it can move in much smaller steps - one microstep is 6.25 microns, which is about 2.5 ten thousandths of an inch.

The balsa will be held between some raised sides made of hard balsa, so that they can be cut easily by the machine if I get a command wrong and move the cutter out of the work area. I expect to put a 2mm felt layer below so that the cutter will have something soft if it goes completely through the workpiece.

Once the machine is set up, we run into the two classic workshop requirements - tooling and work-holding.

We hardly need a powerful spindle or Dremel for cutting balsa, which is what I am going to start with. I am going to use an old brushed boat motor with a small chuck added. But I need an easy way to hold the workpiece.

Here I am making up an experimental vacuum holder. It's sized to take a 4" x 36" sheet of balsa. I hope to slip a blank sheet in, run the machine and take out the equivalent of a die-cut kit sheet an hour later. Note the requirement for everything to be massive and rigid, so that items can be held exactly in a repeatable position without movement while the cutting forces are applied....

Continuing the saga - assembling the mechanics is one thing - getting it to be accurate requires a lot of set-up work!

Here is the machine bolted to a thick chunk of ply, having all the axes checked out for runout. They are all adjustable, so occasionally some shimming needs to be done. Note that though a start has been made on some of the wiring, this is just the mechanics. No motors or control systems have been added yet...

Well, I've got my eShapeoko. I bought all the electronics and motors as well as the mechanical kit from the same source, which meant that I didn't have to do all the work to check compatibility. Total cost, including VAT and postage, was £563 - which is remarkably cheap for a machine with this size cutting bed. if I had wanted to save money and use the free LinuxCNC with a Chinese breakout board I could have dropped the price to around £400 - probably below £350 if I had gone for Chinese Ebay steppers as well.

There are more things to get, of course. Tooling and workholding are the standard extras for any big workshop machine. The eShapeoko is designed to hold a Dremel clone, but I will probably be using a more delicate tool to cut out thin balsa shapes for EeZeBilts. The eShapeoko is quite capable of milling metals, but I don't expect to do that very often. So I can't see the total price rising by a lot - perhaps another £20 or so before I can be cutting my first parts.

The first thing I did when I got the parts was assemble them roughly to check that it all went together properly. Here is a shot - minus the wiring and controls, of course - to give an idea of the size of the thing. With it I can cut keel lengths up to about 36". The maximum cutting width is about 14". I can easily expand it in length by adding longer rails, but this represents a balance between what would be useful and what would fit easily in the shed!

Assembling it is just like making a Meccano kit. Which should present no difficulty to someone of a certain age...! For anyone interested this is the site I got it from: https://amberspyglass.co.uk

I'm thinking about interchanging boat plans as CNC files - so I'm thinking about the sort of machines people are going to have at home. There are a lot of 'cheap Chinese' machines on EBay for £200 up to about £500 - but these will be used for engraving, and will have cutting tables of about 8" square. Boat modellers really need a long axis.

The Shapeoko is an 'open source' hardware design - much like the Rep-Rap, and the great thing about it is that you can specify the axis sizes - so you can have a machine which is a foot by six feet if you wish. I have just bought a UK kit for one called the eShapeoko - 1m x 500mm - cost about £500. But there is so much to consider - calibrating the machine, choosing a spindle drive, picking a software set....

We used a package called aplicam, it suited all the machines once, you told it the machine zero settings it worked it all out for you. And all we had to do was put dimensions on to the pdf files, or trace using a graphics tablet.
It was the best system I used in all my engineering life from school to retirement. I wish I had a copy of it now, it was originally DOS operated in the 70's, and when I retired it was up to Windows 10.
Cheers Colin.

Ah - I've never used any commercial packages - just Open Source. I presume that your company matched their software to the machines they had.

i'm finding that different home machines seem to have slightly different command sets - for homing, for instance....

Using downloaded pdfs, I use a reverse engineering package to get my cnc program (in G code). it worked with all the machinery in our factory, laser, oxy,/acetylene profiler, pulsa and proteus punching machines and also cnc machining centres. Most commercial cnc programs come with reverse engineering. Hope this helps you. Cheers Colin.

Not much point uploading a .pdf, unless it has some unusual conversion software. CNC machines work off G Code.

The work area is critical for model boat work. Typical parts are long and thin. The eShapeoko I am building is a nominal 1m x 500mm, which lets me do a 36" keel piece. I would like to put out G Code for cutting the EeZebilt boats, but am not sure how to standardise it so that many CNC machines will be able to use it. Different CNC controllers seem to use subtly different G Code commands...

My makerspace has a glowforge laser. Sits on a desk like a large printer. Just upload a pdf to it, I have been cutting 6 mm acrilic with it. Work area is about 500 x 250 mm.

That could, indeed, be the simple answer..!

Retired now but when I worked at the College the CAD Technicians just held material in place with masking tape they were cutting anything from silk to 12mm hard woods

I'll probably go for a laser cutter in the end. A big CO2 one - but these are powerful tools, and i'd like to have a reliable cutting bed before experimenting with something that might cut the shed in half!

The obvious answer is to use some driver software that does handle tool radius compensation - I understand that the Tiny board firmware is now open source with a new name - G2Core. I think it needs a bit more poke than an Arduino Uno, though.

I intend to simply slot sheets of balsa into it and crank out kit parts - which means a single pass cut. One issue is how to hold the sheet of balsa down without interfering with the cut. I was wondering about a vacuum base.

If you want to observe a laser cutter safely, I hear that the Yank modellers are sealing them in enclosures, and viewing progress through a webcam, which is one answer....

Which is where laser cutting leaps to the fore with a tool diameter around 0.1 mm.

The Cyclone is a pcb cutter which uses a taper-point tool so there is no offset.

The goal is to mount a laser rather than a Dremel.

Point taken on the smaller parts . My initial thought was that, with a larger platform, you could cut multiple parts from a larger piece of material in one pass. Unfortunately, you can't walk away from a laser cutter to let it get on with things as you can with a 3D printer. You are looking at a potential bonfire and the bigger the job, the longer you have to stand and watch it.

I'm doing the eShapeoko - I wanted a more rigid machine for general purposes, and I liked the fact that you could specify the X and Y axis lengths. For cutting model boat parts you rarely want something as wide as 1 foot - but you often want items of length greater than 1 yard. The eShapeoko has standard sizes as extreme as 15 inches by 60 inches, and can easily be extended. I've gone for 18 x 36 inches - should be fine for EeZebilts...

One of the things that's a bit annoying with GRBL is that it doesn't currently do tool radius compensation. I'm using an arduino with grbl as well, and if I cut my plans as drawn they will all be a tool radius out. I am currently looking to use a 0.5mm tool so the effect will be small - but if you know of a better driver interpreter...?

Having built (well, assembled really) i am currently building a small CNC router with 3D printed parts. See https://reprap.org/wiki/Cyclone_PCB_Factory. Currently redesigning to be driven by GT2 belts and pulleys as I have some reservations about using 3D printed gears from the point of view of back-lash and wear.
The stepper motors are driven from an Arduino Mega running the GRBL g-code interpreter.
There are a host of free g-code generator tools to be found on the internet. Some of them are a bit "knife and fork" but there are some useful ones out there and there is lots of helpful information too.

Have a look at the Banggood website. They are selling A3 sized laser cutters for less than £200. it is sold as an engraver with a 2500 mW laser but this can be upgraded. it should cut ply up to 3mm albeit with multiple passes

It comes as a kit with "Chinese" English instructions so you will need your modelling skills to assemble it.

They are fairly flimsy as a stand-alone, but, if fixed to a stout MDF board, it should be sturdy enough

It's surprising what you can manage on your kitchen table nowadays! Laser cutters are readily available - I could mount one of these on the eShapeoko -

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/60W-CO2-Sealed-Laser-Engraver-Tube-Water-Cool-100cm-Engraving-Cutter/183440666025?_trkparms=aid%3D555018%26algo%3DPL.SIM%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D20140122125356%26meid%3D49f9df92e8c64fdb84245e5fcad07259%26pid%3D100005%26rk%3D2%26rkt%3D6%26mehot%3Dpp%26sd%3D182940435313%26itm%3D183440666025&_trksid=p2047675.c100005.m1851

- but the associated safety provisions would mean doing the cutting in the shed rather than the kitchen.... and the cost is not extortionate.

At the moment I'm more interested in getting up to speed with the technology and the associated costs. Open Source is a wonderful invention - it means that all of your software is free, and the hardware is low-cost because there has been no R&D investment associated with it. I reckon that you can get a cutter with a 1 sq ft bed for 300-400 pounds at the moment, and the prices are coming down all the time....

Our local Makerspace has just acquired a laser cutter. The accuracy and clean nature of the cut are breathtaking. The edges are razor-sharp and the cut width is in the order of 0.1 mm.

I know there are a few fossils out there who will huff and puff about new technology and extolling the virtues of half a Gillette razor blade but heed them not. Google Makerspace, find your local branch and join-up. if they haven't got a laser cutter they'll have a lot of other machinery which will enable to do far more than you can manage on your kitchen table.