Dremel Carver/Duplicator like a Human Powered CNC Router

Step 6 Rev 1.2

Finally some success! As you can tell from the videos, all of the axes are working properly.

Now I just need to work on the accuracy. The x axis (left and right motion) is quite choppy at the moment. Im going make the arm the entire length of the vertical support so that it can only move up and down. The new x axis will be the pipe that the Dremel is attached to. Another improvement will be the addition of skate board bearings on the rails which should improve tool fluency. So stay tuned!

Comments

[Thermonuklear]

Can't wait 'til it's finished! This is something I've had my brain on for a few months now. Simplicity is reliability I always say.

Your design actually reminds me of a pantograph, just with 1:1 scale :D

[joaocarimo]

Good job. I've got an idea that could take this to another step. I would put a laser diode in both edges and an optic sensor as well. The main idea is to have a low energy laser beam to scan an object with the optic sensor in order to send the exact values to the high power laser to do the job using it's optic sensor or diode to guive the input. you should have a X and Y stepper motor. the x axis steppet motor would advance as soon as the difference of the value read on the source scanner and the target is equal to zero. as soon as the x scan is complete, the y axis advances to start all over again untill a full replica is created. The laser diode to scan teh source object could be extracted from a ny tegular cdrom and the high power laser diode, can be obtained from a regular dvd rw device. The circuit would be very simple. Other application: a) Scan a full object. b) Magnify / zoom it to another scale c) duplicate the object in another scale.

[Instructabilis Deus]

That's pretty cool Adran. I tried to come up with something like this a few years back, but never succeeded completely. A couple of ideas I did have that might help though were to use a square piece of plywood on a piano hinge connected to a 1x8, and a couple of ball-bearing drawer slides for the side to side axis, that the 1x8 attaches to. This gave me better side to side accuracy. The piece I never figured out, you clearly did with the drawer slides going forward and back also. Very nice