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

[Mike vonBuelow]

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 - 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

[Mike vonBuelow]

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

DSC_0002.jpg

[Steve Peterson]

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

[Keith Outten]

Mike,

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

Enjoy!
.