My (former) Techno-Isel gantry

This gantry mill was a Techno-Isel Series I XYZ table on which I mounted a Sherline milling head. It is made of aluminum extrusions and equipped with 2mm-pitch ballscrews and linear ball bearings. The overall size of the mill was 39 W x 35 D x 29 H, and it 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. I installed the Sherline 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. In the spindle control box I installed a DigiSpeed controller card which let me control spindle speed through the gcode program, and I added a filter capacitor 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. I routed the spindle AC cord separately to minimize line noise.

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

PT

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This article is ©2009 Randy Gordon-Gilmore. Last updated: 13 July 2007.