The shop & the CNC
The Shop... and the CNC
It took me a while to look at the different brands and options available in Europe, but the layers of distribution costs make the European machines less attractive (for an individual like me, with no real business) cost-wise than the machines one can get with direct import from China. Sad indeed. Being somewhat on a budget, I contacted one of the reputed China manufacturers and spec'ed with their support a machine that would enable me to do guitars, and more.
The machine was ordered mid-August 2022 from BlueElephant, and made it to a France harbor late October. This near 400kgs CNC has a working area of 600mmx1500mm (plenty to build neck-through bass guitars if needed), and its 24000rpm, 2kW water-cooled spindle will carve soft and hard woods as well as soft metals (aluminum, brass, copper,...).
I had plenty of time building a shop to set all equipment and have a dedicated place to work on my next instruments. I settled on one of these flat-roof, pre-made cabins, just below 20sqm.
Meanwhile, the CNC was slowly travelling the World, arriving late November .It took almost as much time to unload from the boat and pass France Customs than to travel by sea from China.
Gotta have friendly neighbours with big tools to carry the 375kg or machine
And the CNC made it into the shop. Nothing hurt or broken :)
2023... Winter has passed, and it's time again to spend time on setting up "the shop"; Electricity, and lots of smaller equipment have to get in too. This took a good part of the end of winter and late spring, pretty much everything is in place to -finally!- plug the CNC and make a first test! Such a long wait :)
With much care in installing the software that came with the CNC, I plugged in the CNC to the mains, connected the CNC control cables to the controller, and the controller to my PC. No bit installed, no watercooling yet as I had no intention to run the spindle, and I started Mach3, the SW that controls the CNC... and Nothing :( I was not able to get the XYZ axis to move in any direction.
Time to call support... and BlueElephant had set a 'direct' Whatsapp group connection to call in case of trouble. Less than an hour after, I had a technician ready to help; I had to provide a remote connection for the support line to access my configuration. We made that over a 4G phone connection, between China and France (thanks for the technology!). Turns out the drivers sent to me were not the right ones. In 2 hours of testing and debugging, new drivers were installed, XYZ moves tested, and despite one miss-hap with the auto zero detect IO pin that resulted in a drill bit exploding because the machine did not stop when touching the zero-plate tool (this can be very dangerous BTW, carbide parts flying... always wear glasses) , I was ready to go!
I also built a 'bed' to set the CNC to body height, so it's easier for me to work on/with it. Big thanks (again) to my neighbor who came with his forklift to set the CNC on top of its rolling support.
Much more comfortable now!
All ready to carve beautiful things... and guitars!!!
