My (former) Techno-Isel gantry

This gantry mill was a Techno-Isel Series I XYZ table outfitted with a Sherline milling head. It is made of aluminum extrusions and equipped with 2mm-pitch ballscrews and linear ball bearings. The mill had a working volume of 19.7 x 19.7 x 3.9 inches. The table surface (made out of T-slotted extrusions) is 30 x 30 inches. I outfitted the mill with a 13 x 10 inch tooling plate (with grid of 10-32 threaded holes) and a 3-inch Enco toolmaker's vise. Techno-Isel Gantry
I made an adapter plate to mount a Sherline milling head to the Z axis. The Sherline milling head was equipped with the 10000 RPM pulley set, and a quick-change motor mount of my own design (change from high to low speed range in less than 30 seconds) based on the Sherline 10krpm mount. The spindle control box was outfitted with a DigiSpeed controller card (control spindle speed through the gcode program) and I added filter cap across the spindle motor brushes to minimize electrical noise. Z-axis with Sherline milling head
The driver box had a 3-axis Xylotex card, a 30V switching power supply (the maximum the Xylotex will handle), high-efficiency switching converter for the 5V logic supply, a filtered power entry module, fuses on both AC and DC, optoisolators on the input lines, ferrite EMI filter beads on all output lines, and a metal EMI fan filter. Stepper cable connectors had threaded locking rings (Radio Shack CB microphone plugs.) stepper driver box
The mill was outfitted with Igus high-flex-life CNC-rated cables running in Igus cable chain and trays. The spindle AC cord was separately routed to minimize line noise.

It was capable of rapids at over 100 inches/minute, but I set the rapids at 60 in/min.

The overall size of the mill was 39 W x 35 D x 29 H.

PT

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This article is ©2007 Randy Gordon-Gilmore. Last updated: 13 July 2007.