Started a project a couple of months ago to build my own CNC machine to try building board moulds with CNC instead of my earlier methods.
Getting most of my gear through aliexpress and steppersonline. At the moment it's looking like I have 120mm height on Z axis, 665mm width on Y axis and 1620mm on my X axix. This will give basically a biggest board size with a small mould sealing perimeter area.
Steppers, controller/drivers, PSUs and 1500watt water cooled spindle motor are from steppersonline.
From aliexpress I got "2pcs SBR12 - 1800mm linear rail bearings guides + 4pcs SBR12UU block cnc route" The Linear rails came very slightly bent which I expected... china to NZ by air! Still very usable though. I've mounted them on wooden rails on an 18mm thick plywood base.
These bearings have a tension adjustment in the middle.
I also got "HLTNC 2 set linear rails HGR15+1 ballscrews SFU1605 any length+ballscrew supportBK/BF12+1 couplers for CNC" for my Y axis. I've mounted these bits on a glued plywood and MDF gantry. For the Z stage I bought this: "3D printer DIY NEMA 23 c-beam Z axis kit CNC Z-AXIS ASSEMBLY kit TR8*8(2mm) lead screw Linear Actuator Bundle kit set". It was a bit loose so I've tightened it up, it's carrying over 4kg of spindle motor!
Currently I have the axis all assembled, waiting for some correct sized flex couplers and then I'm going to fix in the Y axis motor and put dual steppers on the X axis (by each X rail). The stepper motors are all bipolar Nema 23 and I've set up an arduino control board to test the Z axis which is working really well. Waiting for each remaining item from aliexpress to come in the courier... I have a 1500 watt variable frequency drive for the spindle motor, waiting also on pulleys and 4 x 80mm square radiators with fans to cool my spindle motor circulating water.
I'll pop a few photos up as I go and in my first edit to this post. The wood Gantry for the Y stage was a hard decision. I was waiting over a month for an aluminium 40 x 80mm V-slot extrusion from a local factory for it but wasn't 100% convinced it was going to provide a big enough cross section. It's on the courier now but I've already built in MDF and Ply, made it exactly the dimensions I wanted. I'll be designing again in openscad and looking at setting up a PC running Linux to try and get the only open source 3D routing program running to it's latest version. Routing only needs a very basic arduino to handle the control of the driver boards, an arduino is much better suited to accurate step pulse timing than a PC's printer port!