On the road again

CB750

The effort that I put into freshening up the CB750 paid off. I sold the bike and it's new owner will be picking it up this week.

CNC Mill

I have been working in the background on this project, and it is starting to come along...albeit, very slowly.
My main focus now is to complete the Control Box in the next few weeks, and then address the mechanical side of the mill.

Because I have sheetmetal stocked in my garage, I figured that would build a metal box to house all the electronics instead of purchasing one. So I did the layout in SolidWorks, which has an excellent sheetmetal features, and transferred them to sheetmetal. I used 16 gauge sheetmetal for the bottom of the box and 18 gauge everywhere else. The design of the box is such that I could fabricate it with one of those cheap sheetmetal brakes you can pick up at places like Busy Bee Tools.

The sheetmetal brake that was used.



These are some panels bent with the brake. The bottom panel on the left is 16 gauge and has a .5" lip bent on two parrellel sides to allow for riveting. Sitting on top of the bottom panel are two 'L' channels that will be riveted to it. The panels on the right are 18 gauge and have .5" lips bent on the short sides, as well as a "L" channel piece riveted to the top on each.



Mockup of the Control Box without the top.



With the top on.



Here are some of the electronic components that will be going into the Control Box. On the top row left is a toroidal transformer (35-0-35, 600VA)that will be connected to a bridge rectifier and the capacitors (top row right) resulting in a transformer giving 50VDC @17A.
At bottom row left is a Gecko Drives G540. This is an all-in-one unit that contains both the drive electronics for the stepper motors (4 axises) and the control interface to the computer. At bottom row right is one of the solid state relays (SSR) that will be used to control the spindle, and another to control a pump for flood coolant.