Home Brew CNC out of a Drill Press

So I was reading some Tech blogs today and came across a guy who built his own CNC machine out of a drill press. It's pretty amazing. Just thought I would share. Figured HAMBers would want/need to see this. There are some pretty detailed assembly photos as well! Enjoy!!!

http://www.bakamecha.com/Projects/page34/page34.html

 

Wow... that's pretty cool!!

 

That is cool, but it is a much tighter drill press than many of us have, I bet. Any chattering from a cheap press will destroy your tooling in very short order.

 

The "Drill Press" that you are referring to is actually a Chinese made RF-31 vertical mill/drill. The link you posted just shows how the guy made a poor quality mill better.

 

http://www.cnczone.com/forums/benchtop_machines/

I'm not into it, but there's an entire industry built on home made and bench top cnc machines. seems pretty cool to me.

-jim

 

If you want to build you a vertical / horizontal mill/lathe on the cheap go to this link scroll to bottom of page for PDF file......pretty cool reuse of other wise scrap parts.
http://opensourcemachine.org/
Kenny

 

Dont think most drill presses will handle side loads well, it'll work for a while. theres plenty of used drill presses, convert the table to manually feed the work in 2 directions, put in a cutter. you will destroy the drill press eventually.

 

I have built my own home cnc router and bench top mill. Both work great. Fun projects