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Originally Posted by stinglikeabee
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Exactly. This is pretty much where we ended up. Hoss has been super helpful to me and to many others. He is quick and responsive to emails and is willing to help out.
There is a ton of info and several knowledgeable people at cnczone as well.
http://www.cnczone.com/forums/benchtop-machines/
For the electronics we ended up going to
www.cnc4pc.com
The owner Arturo Duncan was super helpful. And he knows all about FIRST as his daughter was part of SPAM's 2012 championship team!
For the control, we had an old PC that we put Mach 3 on. I would recommend getting the Ethernet smooth stepper as it made life super easy not to have to deal with the parallel port.
For the CAM we use HSMworks. if you contact the development team you can request the full version. You need a teacher to do this as they need to be registered through a school district or university. They also have the post processing files for Mach3 so we were able to make chips pretty quickly
As for the conversion. You learn an awful lot about the machine. From tear down to reassembly, you will get to know its weaknesses and strengths. Understand that there are limitations on the machine. Set expectations on what you want out of it. Like I said above don't spend time trying to turn it into a HAAS. It just wont get there.
For us, it turned into a great little machine in which we plan to use to get our students into CNC machining. Thus our students can see and experience the work that goes into making a CNC part, rather than send the part out and the CNC machining fairy brings something back. For future builds we will do simpler parts in house now and send complex parts to our main sponsors.
Best of luck