Mini Milling Machine - Exec. Toy

I think that I put more preparation into the construction of the project than any of the previous ones on this Blog. This was the my leaving present to the Head of my DT Department, after 6 years of me asking him annoying questions, using a large chunk of his departmental budget and pleading with him to allow me to stay just another 2 minutes to finish of the last thing. A 2 minutes which almost always turned into another hour as, it was only the last thing if saying it was the last thing would get me to be allowed to stay that little but longer. Keen I know...

So I wanted to give something back and the only way I felt that I could show my appreciation was to put time and effort into making something for him. I decided to build an "executive toy", a table top milling machine, which would not mill but would write onto a piece of acrylic or a postik note, I chose this idea because he was soon to be moving up through the educational ranks and was to become a deputy head. The machine was meant to look a lot like the milling machine that the department had recently bought.

Department Bought MDX40:

My Design:

I set about designing a machine that could be built entirely from 3 and 10 mm acrylic sheets that I would have laser cut. The few other components were a large number of m3 screws, two micro stepper motors that I sourced from a company called nanotech in Germany, a servo motor, an aluminium turned pencil/pen holder, and some buttons and connectors. I also sourced a leadscrew and used some threaded rod for another leadscrew.

Having designed the entire thing on Solidworks I put together some pdf's of the cutting patterns for different sheet thicknesses and colours and took it to another school which had a laser cutter.

Some of the parts such as the acrylic screen did need some bending to be done on the hot wire bender.

They cut them perfectly for me and with the parts all there I began to assemble with the aid of a solvent based fixing agent and some machine screws. It went together pretty quickly and I felt that I should be making a kit version of the project.

Z-Axis assembly:
Inner assembly:

Outer Shell Assembly:

Full acrylic assembly:

The finished project looked great and I was really happy with it. It did need the addition of a driver board but it was primarily intended as a show piece and this was therefore a pointless extra cost.

The gift was complete and a success; it now sits in a display cabinet in the department.