instructables

Low Cost DIY CNC Router

by Steve Tyng

Hello and welcome to my first Instructable article. In the first four days it's garnered over 20K views which really
blindsided me. I guess there's lot's of CNC enthusiasts out there! If you find this article of interest please consider
voting for it in the First Time Authors contest here. Thanks for stopping by!

This is a hobby CNC router I built for myself that I'd thought I'd share with the Instructables community. This is not
a detailed build log of the router but more of an exploration of my design choices that went into this somewhat
unique tool. There are no plans for this router. Beyond a couple of initial sketches to determine general size,
lengths, and spacing, this router pretty much grew out organically as I was building it. Hopefully other CNC
enthusiasts may see an idea or two that might help them with their projects.

Design parameters

Use as much stuff that I had laying around the shop as possible.
Able to use the router as a bench top when not routing.
A cutting area of 30"x60"x2".
Make it as rigid as possible (for a plywood design).

As to the design I came up with. This is a classic XYZ 3-axis wood cutting router. By classic I mean it has a gantry
that moves along the length of the machine base (Y axis). There is a carriage that the router is mounted to that
runs back and forth on the gantry (X axis). And finally, there is a mechanism that raises and lowers the entire
gantry that moves the router up and down (Z axis). Yes, I said the entire gantry moves up and down. We'll be
getting into that later. As to motion, I'm using stepper motors and roller chain. For the linear rails, I'm using steel v-
bearings running over steel angle iron. The primary construction material is plywood.

Lets get to the picture show.

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Step 1: The Base
Every tool needs a good base. Instead of building
from scratch I re-purposed an Ikea cabinet I had
available. The cabinet was completely disassembled
and then put back together using adhesive at every
junction. I reinforced the cabinet by melding in a 2x6
substructure on the bottom. Casters and levelers
where added for mobility. Finally, I used a commercial
solid core door for a bench top. Not shown, but the
door was shimmed so it would lay as flat and true as I
could make it. The door will be the actual base for the
Low Cost DIY CNC Router: Page 2
router.
Why a solid core door for the machine base? For one,
I had it available. I use these doors as bench tops in
my shop. Secondly, commercial solid core doors are
built to be as flat and true as possible. And third, their
heavy as hell and I thought all that mass would be
advantageous in soaking up vibrations from the
router.
Step 2: Linear Rails
Linear rails for CNC seem to be a dime a dozen
nowadays on eBay and Alibaba, but in 6' lengths?
Not so cheap. What is cheap is 1-1/2" angle iron at
my local home center. Something else that's cheap
(at least cheaper than they used to be) are 3/8" ID
steel v-bearings. Combine the two, and we get the
linear rail system I'm using in this build. Pictured here
are my first tests using angle iron and the v-bearings.
Seemed to work well so I cut the 45 degree plywood
rail beds on the tablesaw and mounted the angles to
the underside of the router base. Not well pictured,
but tensioning of the v-bearings onto the angle is
accomplished by a bolt and dowel-nut setup. Those
slits between the v-bearings allow for enough
movement for the tensioning.
Something you may have noticed are the plywood
strips attached to the edge of the door/router table.
There's nothing significant about these. After I cut the
Low Cost DIY CNC Router: Page 3
door to size I decided I wanted to increase the X
travel to a full 30" which required widening the table.
Why mount the Y rails under the table? This left the
top clear so the entire surface could be used for
cutting. It also allows me to use the router as a
work/assembly bench when I'm not routing.
Notice how far apart the the pairs of Y axis v-bearings
are apart on the bottom of the gantry side plate? I did
this to mount the gantry plates as rigidly as possibly.
This made the plates longer which required more
table length to get me the 60" of Y travel that I
wanted.
Sorry to say but this is about it for historical photos of
this build. The pics that follow were all taken after the
router was pretty much complete and operational.
Low Cost DIY CNC Router: Page 4
Step 3: Gantry and Carriage Details
The gantry is built from two layers of 3/4" ply glued
together. Along the top and bottom, 45 degree
recesses were cut and 3/4" angle irons where bonded
into them using Gorilla glue. The entire gantry moves
up and down for the Z axis motions. To accomplish
this, the gantry has a length of 1-1/2" angle iron in the
vertical orientation that sit in v-bearings attached to
the gantry side plates. The up and down power is
supplied by a NEMA 23 stepper and screw assembly
on each end.
Notice the gantry overhangs? The gantry beam is
mounted in front of and extends past the side support
plates. This allows the router carriage to slide past
the side supports (more on the right than on the left
btw). You don't see this much on DIY routers for
some reason. This setup allows the router to cut from
edge to edge a full 30" in the X axis.
The router carriage is glued up from two layers of 1/2"
all the Z axis mechanics and motor from the router
carriage, greatly simplified wiring going to the
carriage. Third, I figured why not? It works in 3D
printers and as it turns out, is working quite well with
this router. Besides, it looks cool when the entire
gantry moves up and down.
Z motor mounting. What may not be obvious is how I
have the two Z motors attached and mounted to the
jack screws. In a typical setup, these motors would
be hard mounted to a base. The screws would be
mounted in a bearing assembly. To connect the two
would be a flexible coupling. I avoided all that
complexity by hard mounting the motors to the screw
shafts. The only thing holding those motors in place
are the 1/4" shafts stuck into the 1/4" holes I drilled
into the screw shaft ends on my mini-lathe. The
motors are kept from spinning by the wood bracket
with that rubber bushing on the end (which allows the
motor to wobble if it has to). This may seem an odd
way of doing this but this method eliminates the
flexible coupling and fiddling with alignment. The 1/4"
shafts of the stepper motors are more than strong
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cabinet grade plywood, much the same way as the
gantry side plates. Since I have that overhanging
gantry, I was able to make the router carriage longer
(spreading the v-bearings further apart) which
increases rigidity in the X axis. The Makita router is
mounted on the left side of the carriage. This opened
up area for the dust collection system to the right of
the router. The carriage has four of the v-bearings
that run on the top and bottom angles on the gantry.
Tensioning is done the same way as on the gantry
side plates.
Flying gantry? To provide the Z axis motion the entire
gantry moves up and down. On most CNC routers the
gantry is fixed and the Z axis motion is all done at the
router carriage. I'm moving the entire gantry for a few
reasons. First, my thinking is that if I moved the Z axis
mechanics out to the ends placing them between the
gantry and the gantry side plates, I could spread the
loads out and increase rigidity. Secondly, removing
enough to keep the motors in place.
For X and Y axis motion, the carriage has one NEMA
23 240oz (torque) stepper mounted. The Y axis
motion is powered by a single 425oz stepper that is
driving a shaft that is attached to both ends of the
gantry. Mechanically, it would have been easier to go
with two steppers for the Y axis but I only had one
motor available at the time and I had the shafting and
bearings to fabricate the drive. One nice thing with
this setup is that the gantry will never go out of
alignment due to a motor skipping.
A chain reduction on the axis drives? I first built this
with the stepper's driving the chains directly. In the
initial testing, I was getting a lot of skipping in the
(weak) motors I was using at the time. I had the
sprockets and bearings available so I added the
reductions. Besides adding a ton or torque, they
definitely helped in the precision category (more on
that later).
Low Cost DIY CNC Router: Page 6
Low Cost DIY CNC Router: Page 7
Step 4: Roller Chain?
Yep, I used 25P roller chain in this build. I didn't use
timing belts, ballscrews, or rack and pinion. If you
don't know, roller chain has a bad rap in the DIY CNC
community. Arguments against are that it stretches,
it's not very accurate, and it caused the fall of the
Roman Empire! Anyhow, I didn't know all that when I
started this build and I had a bunch of the chain left
over from another project. I'm enough of an engineer
to know that roller chain could have issues but I had
some ideas on how to mitigate those. Before I started
this build I'd studied other chain driven designs and
always noticed one thing. These other chain designs
always seemed to have the chain hanging out in mid-
air, unsupported, with some sort of flimsy looking
tensioning system on the ends. Roller chain has
some weight to it, even #25 chain. What will happen if
5' of it suspended horizontally in mid air? It will droop
and no matter how tight you tension it, it will still
droop to some degree. What that droop on a linear
motion system means is that you will not get
consistent movement along it's length. What I did with
this design is that the chains are supported along
Low Cost DIY CNC Router: Page 8
their entire lengths. The X axis chain sits in the
bottom of the top angle of the gantry. The Y axis
chains lay in a cutout in the Y angle supports. There's
no drooping in these chains! To secure the ends of
the chains, I used 3mm hex wrenches which fit quite
nicely in the #25 chain. Tensioning is handled by
flexible sections of ply on one end of each of the
chains. A tensioning screw runs though a t-nut which
bends the ply tensionor out and pulling the chain
taught.
Note that the chain mounting and tensionors sit right
on the angle iron ends. This setup uses the angles in
compression to add to the rigidity of the chain
mounting.
What's that coupling looking thing in the first pic?
That's a compression coupling that joins the left and
right Y axis sprocket drives. Loosening this up allows
me to precisely adjust the gantry perpendicular to the
Y axis travel.
Low Cost DIY CNC Router: Page 9
Low Cost DIY CNC Router: Page 10
Step 5: Router and Dust Collection
The router is the Makita RT0701C 1/4" trim router
(earlier pics show a cheap Harbor Freight router
which has since been chucked). The router has
turned out to be precise and it has a nice speed
adjustment built into it.
Dust collection. I have a small basement shop and I
wanted good dust collection on this machine. One
wrinkle with this design is that since the router
carriage moves up and down with the gantry, I had to
come up with a design that keeps the dust shoe on
the work piece. This was accomplished by mounting
the dust shoe on an arm that allows it to freely move
up and down in relation to the gantry. Three plastic v-
bearings were used as shown in the pic. The one
bearing is attached to the movable arm that allows for
Low Cost DIY CNC Router: Page 11
a quick and easy removal of the dust shoe from the
machine. The dust shoe was machined (first thing I
cut on this router) out of two pieces of 1/2" plywood.
The bottom pad was cut out of a painting pad and
allows the shoe to float over any screws or bumps in
the work piece.
The dust cyclone is mounted on top of a standard 5
gallon bucket and keeps most (if not all) the dust out
of the 8 gallon shopvac that I'm using.
This setup has proven very good at sucking the dust
and chips up. After a cut, there's hardly any dust left
on the work piece or floating around the shop.
Step 6: Controls and Wiring
Not many pics on this one I'm sorry to say. The
control system is Arduino UNO based and I'm running
the EstlCAM CNC software (which is awesome IMO).
On the wall is a little Windows 10 media PC that is
running the Windows side of the EstlCAM system. A
wireless keyboard, mouse, and a game-pad finish the
controls out.
On the back of the machine inside the black box in
the center is an Arduino Uno which is running the
Estlcam controller software. In the electrical box is a
10A SSR (solid state relay) which switches the router
on and off. To the left on a shock mounted base are
Low Cost DIY CNC Router: Page 12
the TB6600 stepper drivers. The power supply is a
24V 15A fanless design.
The wiring to the motors is running through the
flexible black cable protectors picked up at a
computer store. The actual motor cabling is four
conductor trailer wire.
Noticed that articulated cable support going to the
router carriage? A couple pieces of plywood and
some hinges, and a quick and easy cabling solution
to the carriage is the result. Works quite well.
Step 7: Does It Cut?

Of course it does!

There's been issues of course and It's a continuing learning curve. I've been experimenting with materials, cut
depths, and feed rates to see what the router can do.

Currently, for cutting plywood and MDF, I've been running around 70IPM (inch per minute) speeds on a .25 bit with
a .28 cut depth. The Z axis is currently set to 20IPM.

Free travel speed is set to 140IPM with no issues.

Low Cost DIY CNC Router: Page 13

https://youtu.be/wD5KRtZmsnQ

Low Cost DIY CNC Router: Page 14

Step 8: Is It Accurate?

How's .005" repeat-ability sound? Yeah, I know. That very happy with it. Not to shabby for a machine that
sounds to good to be true with a DIY roller chain might have $900 of material in it.
driven plywood router but that's what I've seen in
some of my testing. I'm not saying .005" accuracy will Hope you enjoyed this write up. I'll add content as I
come out of this machine with every cut but at even think of it and I look forward to any comments or
four times worse, it's a lot more accuracy than I was suggestions.
ever expecting.
Thanks for reading.
So why so accurate? Who knows? Maybe I'm an uber
machine designer and fabricator. Maybe that Steve
reduction on the motors had something to do with it?
Maybe the stars were in alignment? All I know is I'm

Low Cost DIY CNC Router: Page 15

Step 9: Accesories

First thing you learn when you get your CNC router up and running, is that you immediately want to start improving
it. My first project along these lines was a touchplate for automatic zeroing. These are usually made from milled
aluminum but I figured some plywood and some aluminum tape and strips would work. It did!

https://youtu.be/K8jZ33agu9w

Low Cost DIY CNC Router: Page 16

You sir are a genius! I wish I'd seen this before starting to design my own router months ago. I may
make some changes based on this. Thanks for posting it.
This thing is amazing.. You make me feel lazy for buying a Shapeoko 3.. :-)

Excelente trabajo, felicidades

Thank you for an excellent project. I built my own CNC router table and I've been considering
building a better one ever since using mine to make the parts. I like this one and would like to use
some of your ideas. Hopefully you will be able to add some more detailed drawings or files.
Such neat solutions to so many problems. Your planning and execution are amazing. I am copying
everything that applies to my build.
Thanks! I look forward to seeing your build posted.

Really well done, and I agree, the roller chain design you came up with is really smart.
"Conventional wisdom" needs to be examined more often.
This is fantastic! Great job!

Thanks!

Hi. Have some fun, put one of these 4.2w lasers on. I put one on they are easy and cheap
enoungh and do a great job on wood designs burned into the surface.
https://jtechphotonics.com/?product=3-8w-laser-and-2-5amp-safety-compliant-driver-kit
And nice work on you build by the way...
I'll think about it Dude!

That "cable chain" is genius. Very nicely done

Thanks Dude!

This is really nice. Good job thinking outside the box! I love using angle iron as the rails. Definitely
keeps the cost down.

Any chance of doing a parts list?

I'll get to work on it.

I am very impressed... That's very good engineering

Each part had to really precision . It's as good as things I've had engineers draw up and made in
the shop. We immediately machine and prototypes made from wood out of quality metals and
plastic materials to hold the tolerance for as many cycles as possible ... It is funny about the chain
but , if it stays true for you that's cool. If i go with my intuition in situations as those , even against
the crowd so to speak it seems to work but , if i go with my head and cant see why it wouldn't work
and i can save time or material , it comes back to bite me : ) In your case it did well up front .. really
impressed with your engineering and work !
It's all mine! Thanks for the kind words.

I have been on the fence about trying to make one and with your plans I think this is a definite
GO!!! Thanks for putting this out there! Nice Job!!
Thansk!

excellent - I have been searching for years for an inexpensive yet easy to build and high-quality
DIY CNC router. I think I found it. Thank you.
Glad you like it.

Low Cost DIY CNC Router: Page 17

Wow, are you near CT, I'd give 500 plus material to put one together for me here lol. Nice work,
chains may prove better in the long run since don't stretch as easily, probably none in this
scenario. May want some dust guard for em but meh :) thank you
LOL! I'm down in Maryland unfortunately... Else I might take you on the offer! :-)

Very cool build, do you remember what Ikea cabinet it was?

It's from the Ikea Varde collection. No longer manufactured unfortunantly.

Awsome job I now have another project dream to do eventually.

Thanks and my apologies for adding to your dream load!

Any possibility of you doing a more detailed version of this? I’m looking to make one but have
some questions that I’m not sure where to ask.
You mean for me to get off my arse and do an actual plan set? ;-) I wasn't to keen on the idea until
the 17K views this Instructable has gotten in the first three days. I'm toying with the idea, trying to
think of ways to simplify the design a bit. I'll let you know...
Really nice job sir! Your article is well written and your project is an inspiration. I repurposed a
1980s Seiko pick and place robot as a cnc machine. It has crazy accuracy as it uses precision
bearings and guide ways. I've spent around $5k. That includes almost $3k in software. I do,
however want to have a 4 x 8 feet wood router. I don't, however want to spend more than $1k for it.
I'm glad to see your engineering approach.
Thanks for the kind words. Post your 4x8 router build. I'm looking forward to seeing it.

Really nice job on your first Instructable :)

Thanks!

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