Ivan Miranda Built a 3D-Printed CNC Router

CNC routers and mills are, by necessity, quite large and heavy. Part of that is because traditional machine layouts need to be larger than the size of the material they’re designed to work with. But, a lot of the reason they’re so heavy because they need to be incredibly rigid in order to withstand the forces involved without any deflection. Conventional wisdom says that precludes 3D-printed CNC machines, but Ivan Miranda was able to make that work anyway for his CNC router.

Miranda’s projects, like his permanent marker printer and firefighting robot, are almost always built from 3D-printed parts. He wanted to expand his fabrication capabilities to include CNC-cut wood and aluminum, so he turned to 3D printing to build his own router. The design he came up with is built almost entirely from aluminum extrusion and 3D-printed joints and mounts. It has a traditional Cartesian layout, and appears to be big enough to hand 2 foot by 4 foot sheet material.

Each axis rides on linear rails, and is moved by pulleys driven by large stepper motors. Those are controlled by an Arduino Uno running Grbl software. For the spindle, Miranda used a simple handheld router made by Makita. That’s mounted on a Z-axis assembly and is actuated by a lead screw. After calibrating the axes, Miranda was able to get very nice cuts when working with plywood, and was even able to do some decent cutting in aluminum. That’s very impressive for a CNC router made with 3D-printed parts.