I jumped in and bought a machine .... now what ?

Ok, I'm stepping outside of my laser comfort zone.... and I'm the proud new owner of a Lumenlab router (yes, that company that went out of business).
But, I picked it up for $300 and a nice 2 hour drive to San Jose! I figured I can get at least the basics down and maybe a few practice something-or-anothers made before I need to spend too much more.


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For my fellow Lumenlab owners:
I'm all ears for anyone to show me the ropes... and what to avoid :eek: - I'm guessing the silver think is a intro-level spindle?


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For my fellow SMC'ers: If anyone has a diagram handy for how I need to hook the stepper motors up to the driver card thingy, that would be a HUGE help.
I think I got the majority of how to make it go, computer/program-wise... but I may (LOL, I said 'may') be back for more questions & forum browsing

Guess a photo of the board would be helpful...

The green terminal bank has (from left to right as seen in the photo) 2,4,4,4,3 inserts

Attachment 294360

Hi Mike,

Does the controller have any labels that would allow you to track down a manual? It may be a controller from a company that is still in business.

Do the stepper motors have 4 or 6 wires? The controller would have to be specific to the particular motor type. It looks like the controller runs from a parallel port which should send 2 signals per port to control the direction and to tell the motor to step. There might be some labels on the green outputs describing which pins are grouped to a particular motor. The 2 motors on the same axis might get connected to the same controller pins.

The router itself looks like a common design. Many homebrew designs look like this. Everything rides on metal rods that likely have a fair amount of flex. This can limit the accuracy and obviously would prevent you from cutting metal. It still looks like a fun machine once you get it up and running.

There are other forums out there that might be able to provide more info. CNCzone is a huge forum dedicated completely to CNC machines.

Steve

Mike,

As long as your CNC Router is operational it will be fun to run :)

Enjoy!
.