Enclosing a Sherline CNC 2000

j ferguson

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On what has turned out to be very good advice received here, I bought a Sherline 2000 with the stepper mounters but w/o the controls. I bought probotix stepper drivers, parallel interface card, 24 volt power supply, an EMC box and put the whole thing to together with a PC which was looking for something to do, LinuxCNC, a post-processor for converting ProE CL files to G-Code.

I should add that I did my own system because I wanted to see what was required not to deny Sherline the business. I plan to build a 5 axis Gantry Mill eventually and wanted to get my feet wet first.

And it works.

It looks like I have a misting system in my future, but am confronted by the box problem - what to do. I usually mock-up stuff I'm building in ignorance and then correct my errors, but I thought it might be better to ask here and maybe avoid an iteration or two.

I'm initializing cuts by zeroing the cutter at a point included in the G-code, so I need to be able to operate the hand-wheels.

It occurs to me that i could leave an opening in the top of the box for the Z-axis and motor so the box wouldn't need to be so tall. I've also seen enclosures with an opening for the Y-Axis. X-Axis doesn't look so easy. If I do this and have a hinged cover on the front, I ought to be able to set up for each run and still keep the size (and hopefully the cost) of the box down. My thought would be to build it of polycarbonate with extruded aluminum corner channels and a piano hinge for the front - also polycarbonate.

I'm cutting aluminum almost exclusively and have been using a shop-vac to clean up the chips when I'm done. I assume I'll have to experiment with setting up the misting system to make the chips go somewhere I can get at them.

Can any of you sense anything nuts in what I've laid out?
 
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what about a rail and a heavy shower curtain type material? That would give you some flexibility too if you ever need to put something long or odd shaped in there.
 
what about a rail and a heavy shower curtain type material? That would give you some flexibility too if you ever need to put something long or odd shaped in there.

Hadn't thought of that. Would certainly be easy to try. Thanks much, John
 
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