I bought a CNC Taig mill, it is a little desktop unit made in the good ole USA. I am its second owner and am looking to give it the love it deserved. when I got it from the PO (a mechanical engineer) it has over 80 tho of play on the Z axis... and not in the vertical direction either... I have had it a few weeks now and beeen avoiding playing with it too much, but finally found an actual and real need to use it so I r&Red all the ways and gibs. Not too bad a job, goes a lot faster than you would think. squaring up the Z-axis takes longest by far. Althogh tightening the adjustable nuts for the leadscrews is a little touch and go. I think I left them a little too loose, but for now looser is better than tight to wear them out prematurely. Gibs were a LOT easier than expected to do. All this is documented on youtube so I won't go into detail. I am also re-wiring the control box since I think a open to the environment enclosure isn't the best setup even if it is a few feet away from a metal dust spewing machine.
The PC that runs it is an old P4, needs an update or reformat or something. whenever the CPU pegs at 100% whole mill jitters for ~1 second. not a good thing for precesion work! Will probably move over to linuxCNC as I assume that will solve my problem.
The previous owner somehow whent without limit/homeing switches his whole life. No clue how that works. I am not gonna put limit switches on it since it is a dainty machine, hitting the ends is not the end of the world, and pretty unlikely as I will be implementing software limits and homeing switches. My experience with 3d printers turned me onto a very cheap micro switch that has <.1mm repeatability that I will be using as a homing switch. The nice thing about a 3d printer, is I could whip out my X home switch mounts in a few minutes with almost no intervention on my part. Milled parts may be more practical, but once calibrated (calibrating is a months long hell procedure!) a 3d printer can be a very nearly set it and forget it, and "set" is simply press a button.
I made 4 of those in about an hour, and for a sense of scale those are M3 screws. The T slots are tiny on the sides, M4s are used everywhere else.
Ah well should really get to bed, long day at work tomorrow, will update some more then. A huge thanks to Devestator tho, he has been offering me all kinds of help and support on even the dumbest of questions and I know he will save me from pulling out all my hair in the near future!
He's a great carpenter, but for the love of god keep him away from metal. That stuff was the gummiest aluminium I have ever seen, I sure appreciate lube and am finally accepting the counter-intuitive fact that sometimes faster is better when cutting.