CNC Junkyard Heaven Today...

[rb99]

I went to a recycling company today that was gutting 4 CNC machines. Beautiful rails, excellent ball screws complete with motors, everything. Y axises, and tons of Boch aluminum extrusion. Everything is really heavy duty. I did not know what to do...

Each machine was completely enclosed in a room on the factory floor made up of heavy Boch extrusion like the Shopbot uses for rails. Not as tall, but about 5" square. Lengths are up to 9'10".

The plates and odds and ends are selling by the pound, the extrusions by the foot.

The ball screw tracks complete systems in an aluminum track, with like a 1"-2" diameter ball screw about 8' long... a skid of them, maybe 8-10.

The Y axis was made of a really heavy duty sqyare aluminum extrusion about 12" square and 1" thick, mounted to a flat plate, then a ball screw system underneath it...

I don't know what to do with the stuff... I will probably not buy much of anything as I don't know how to integrate it into my machine, and it will most likely be going fast.

There are lots of motors, but I think they are servos. There was a software program the guy said was worth $300,000.

I bought about 75' of different heavy duty e chain. I will use what I need and sell off the rest.

They apparently have 2 more complete machines they are going to try to sell without tearing them down to raw materials.

There was a beautiful Y axis, and before I knew it the guys have torn it apart for scrap tubing. So sad...

I am going back tomorrow to dream some more.

If anyone has any advice what I can do with the rails, tracks linear motion stuff let me know.

I wish some of you smart guys lived near me...

[CNYDWW]

If i had that opportunity, i would grab a Z, Y, and some extrusion to build myself a three axis cnc lathe aka stand alone indexer. Build a static gantry with the Y and Z mounting it over a large lathe or even getting an indexer kit. Simple three axis setup and you've got a cnc lathe. By the sounds of it, i a really heavy duty one at that.

Regards,
Randy

[rb99]

I know but all that is out of my league... these machines were made to do tasks like gluing and sawing things. They are all wired up with servo motors and I don't think I can afford to buy any of the stuff to just play around. The recycle place wants good money for the ball screw setups (asking $1000 each). They are beautiful things that are about 8' long, about a 2" diameter 8' long screw with an amazing thread, heavy duty rails, bearings and plates plus the servo motors all in a self contained heavy duty aluminum tray...

The Y was 66 inches and weighed 270 pounds. Pretty heavy considering it was mostly aluminum. It would bolt right onto the 8' ball screws I described above.

Apparently the company left for the US and left these behind for scrap. They were custom built by a guy who is pretty talented. It took him a year and a half to build them all.