Re: plans to fabricate a robotic arm or APC for a desktop homemade CNC mill

--- In CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO@yahoogroups.com, "Enviromen" <enviromen@g...>
wrote:

>
>
> Hi,
>
> Does anyone have, or know where to find plans to fabricate a robotic
> arm or automatic pallet changer (APC) for a homemade CNC mill? What

I

> hope to do is this:
> 1. desktop CNC mill engrave on wood
> 2. robotic arm unload wood or APC1 move out to make way for APC2
> 3. robotic arm load new wood or APC2 move into desktop CNC mill
> 4. desktop CNC mill engrave on new workpiece
> 5. process 1-4 repeated.
>
> If this is too difficult to fabricate, where can one purchase them?
>
> Thanks

It would seem you want to load stock onto the machine, engrave it,
then unload and re-load.

It is not that hard of a concept and making such a unit work
flawlessly would in my opnion, depend on the stock.

If you can use 12 foot boards, than cut out the part(S), feed, cut,
feed, cut, then it would be much simplier than if you had a finished
plaque that much be perfectly alligned.


What you would have is almost 2 independant machines.

How many blanks do you need between manual loading ?

How many parts can be made from one cutter ?

I think if you balanced parts to cutter or had some hours of work
between loading it might help determine the size machine.

I can envisoin a couple ways of doing it. But it mostly depends on
the size and type of blanks/stock.

The robotic arm is just a small piece of the project, and may not be
the best choice.

Here's an idea, a long gantry machine with two gantries. one is the
engraving end, the other parts end. someone stacks parts, the pick-
up pulls a part, then deposits it in the alignment section.

The alignment occurs and the part is placed on a fixture and cpamped.

the fixture is mounted on a rotating arm. when one part is done, the
arm rotates swapping finished part for new. the finished part is
then placed on the 'done' section of the machine.

As you can imagine, the whole parts loading, alignment and unloading
is a machine in and of itself.

Even if you had a stack of blanks and did something similar with the
alignment and clamping and used an arm to exchange parts, the whole
parts swapping would need to run independantly from the cutting.

Dave