Guilt-Free CNC!

I've had a lot of ideas for things to do with my CNC router. But I've been reluctant to do much with it as it's quite noisy, and I don't want to disturb the neighbors. What I needed was an enclosure that would drop the decibels down to a civilised level. For a while I was trying to come up with a design that would not only hold the router, but also a vacuum connected to the dust boot so the machine could run clean and it would all be nice and quiet.

But that was a very ambitious idea; too ambitious, and to be honest just not really neccessary: a simpler enclosure would contain the dust and I could just vacuum it up after each job was done. So I finally settled on a more realistic plan: a simple wooden frame with acrylic walls. A yoga mat along the base would provide a seal and reduce noise being transmitted through the table, and I could pass the cables through a cut in the mat and under the enclosure so I wouldn't need any special sockets or anything. It took me far longer than it should have (it's been a weird year...), but that's exactly what I (eventually) made:

Cutting the acrylic was a job. Originally I tried various cutting bits on my dremel tool, but none of them worked all that well and I actually broke a dremel tool in the process. In the end I used a hobby scriber that I modified to be able to cut deeply enough to get through the thick acrylic; I found this cut much more cleanly than any of the power tools, and it was easier to get a straight cut with it.

With the acrylic cut to shape I could start work on the frame. But for some reason the wood I bought for the frame was warped. I don't think I bought it that way; it seems to have happened in the time I left it sitting around? Which to be fair was quite a long time, but it still surprised me. Well, I did the best I could and figured it wasn't the end of the world if the sides of the box were not 100% straight.

Once everything was cut and drilled and ready to be assembled, I... ran out of screws. I had bought a pack of 125 wood screws, which seemed a strange number but proved to be a couple of dozen screws short. And wouldn't you know it, when I went back for another pack they only had a slightly different type of screw (in a different colour), and only in packs of 250. While it strangely bothers me to have two different colours of screw, I didn't want to put the project on hold for something so silly.

When putting it all together I found the easiest way of dealing with the enclosure was to leave the side of the table empty, and simply tip the enclosure onto it's side to gain access to the router. However this meant the control box and laptop couldn't sit there, so I had to put the control box underneath the table. Which was a little fiddly as the cables were a little short and didn't give me much leeway. But I managed to make it work.

Finally it was time to cut something. Crossing my fingers, I started it up. And wouldn't you know it, it worked! The noise was a lot lower than before, low enough that I doubt my neighbors can hear it now.

And the fruits of my labour:

Only one small mistake (the grooves in the base aren't long enough), and it's my fault, not the machine's! The new straight-flute bit seems to be cutting well enough, and I've made a lot of improvements to my GCode-writing scripts, so... yeah, I'm feeling pretty happy today.