One of our other member sis just waiting delivery of a Shapeoko 4. Capable of cutting steel and stainless steel and just within budget. You can also get CNC Sherline machines which may suit your needs too. In both cases the depth and width of cut are quite small but this is offset somewhat by the high spindle speeds allowing a fast feed.

The Bantum you link too looks capable but at $4K a bit over your budget! The lower budget ones will do it but will take even smaller cuts and finish starts to decline as they get very low in the price range

Don't forget you will also need to learn CAD & CAM to get the most out of the machine as well as needing a reasonable understanding of feeds & speeds

Edited By JasonB on 15/04/2021 07:39:48

Yes they do seem to give some sound advice and have videos suggesting feeds and speeds for most common materials.

They also do another machine called the "Nomad" which is closer to the Bantum that John linked to being closer to a mill than gantry router but still over his budget but not by quite so much

John Hinckley

i built a cnc router many years ago thinking I’d use one of my routers in it

after 10 minutes it gets very tiring ( the noise)

try and buy a water cooled spindle and vfd which will also have a er11 with it

much better

watercooled much quieter than air cooled

Ian,

I have an air-cooled spindle with variable-speed control and ER11 chuck already which I intend trying with the router. (It was cheap!) At the moment it's set up for use in the lathe. In fact I'm going to experiment with it to mill the new thread in the ER11 collet for the conversion of the DeWalt router to ER11 collet operation.

Maybe a water-cooled version will be on the cards later – my wife is already tut-tutting about the costs so far!  Lucky I know she's only joking – or is she?

Jason,

I'll start a new thread when I've got it all set up, but I'll video the process and also put a few pictures in an album as well. As for Fusion, I've downloaded a user's guide for the CAM section from Autodesk, but I still can't get it to do what Lars does. I've also tried to download an earlier version, so that I see what he sees, but no luck, yet. Still, perseverance will pay off in the end, I hope.

John

Edited By John Hinkley on 15/04/2021 10:52:23

Emgee,

Just had a quick look at that link and it certainly appears to be what I'm after. I'll give it closer inspection later when the soaps are on the tv.

John

A lot will depend on what "steel" you are wanting to cut. A low carbon "mild steel" will be easier to cut than say 303 Stainless but High carbon tool steels may not.

The router/spindle based machines tend to be best suited to small cutters and these need the higher speeds. Also as they may not be so robustly built as a mill or Vertical Machining Centre the have to take smaller cuts which if running at lower speeds would mean a very long machining time.

Fusion is free had very capable but you may not like the cloud base though file scan be stored on your own machine if you want.

Alibre Workshop (what John Mentions) has their entry Atom CAD and Meshcam as basic CAM, about £500 one off or you have the option to pay for maintenance and get updates.

You can do most things in Fusion offline provided you connect once every couple of weeks by running in "offline mode"

I had a quick play with F360 to see how some of the cutting parameters suggested for the Shapeoko compare to what I tend to use on the KX-3 mill.

Taking an adaptive clearing path I did last week and working as if it were aluminium my machine would have done it in 2mins 1 second as I can't run the tool as fast as it could go meaning feed is limited. The Shapeoko with it's higher spindle speeds and therefore faster feeds all be it with a smaller DOC and stepover did the same job in 2mins and 25seconds so not too bad, that's assuming rapids can be used at full speed.

Now taking the same part as if it were steel which it actually was the high minimum spindle speeds of a router/spindle work against you so a smaller diameter cutter has to be used to keep the surface speed in check which is weaker so smaller cuts are needed. Doing the same cut in steel on my machine came out at 2mins 28seconds but although the Shapeoko can do it the down side is the simulator gives a time of 2hrs 24mins!

So as the makers say they will cut steel and stainless but really only practical for the odd occasion rather than choosing one of these type of machines if you will mostly be cutting ferrous metals.

Edited By JasonB on 16/04/2021 14:03:21