For those of you who need to make repairs on the road, this might be the answer:
July 1, 2013 By
Take the machine shop with you; that’s the mantra which drove [Ryan] to build this CNC mill in a briefcase. That album will give you a taste of the final product. But you’ll want to dig through two pages of his forum thread starting with this post in order to behold the build process.
The image above is only part way through the fabrication, but we thought it gave the best overall view of his work. It’s missing the cables which connect to the control circuitry in the lid. The bed has also not been installed and this was before he fabricated the protective case for the PCBs.
Getting everything to fit inside of a folding case was quite a trick. Of course he used CAD to make sure it was possible. There are several places where the clearance when closed is about 2mm. We’re shocked by the build quality of the mill itself. It’s a novel idea to make it portable, but the accuracy and reliability of the machine didn’t suffer for the concept.
If you need a desktop mill that’s not quite as portable here’s a project which will dish out some inspiration.
Comments
looks nice. Is this affordable ? Could also serve as a main primary CNC tool at home, if cheap enough.
@John,
If you were at a field base and had access to ac power, this would be perfect to make repairs without having to go back to the home base which is usually in a big city or town.
Regards,
TCIII