If I remember correctly, it was John Saunders with his YouTube Channel NYC CNC who made me think I need a CNC maschine. In fact I don't really need it but just as little I need the maschine itself but I love it.
However this is just a hobby and nothing to earn money with, thus I cant spend tens of thousands of euro for a CNC maschine. So I decided to convert my existing maschine to CNC by my own.
Here is what I have to start with:
The RF-45 clone mills are very popular an therefor it comes as litte surprise that I'm by far not the first one who build a CNC with this mill. After googling a while around I found a hole lot of CNC conversations and buildlogs which gave me some ideas on how to do it and also showd some caveats.
There are two build which I found pretty impressive and nicely documented. The first one is the build documented at http://www.cnccookbook.com/CCMillCNCConversionHome.html. What makes this build special is the fact that the builder filled up the base casting and parts of the column with granite epoxi to gain some rigidity and vibration damping. The website in general is very intersting and shows many aspects of CNC maschining and considerations when building your own CNC maschine.
The other build log I'd like to mention is the "CM5k" build by Jared "jid2" showed here: http://www.cnczone.com/forums/printthread.php?t=122462. I found this entire thread very impressive and it gave me also many ideas for my own build.
I started a discussion at the german forum Zerspanungsbude.net - Thread #26643. This thread started with some considerations, ideas and planning of the build and also contains the entire build log. Actually it's the comprehensive discussion this site is based on. The fellows there helped me to figure out whats the best strategy and what I have to take in consideration to do a successful build.
Here are the milestones:
The hardware stuff:
The software stuff: