MPCNC - The Mostly Printed CNC

Last week a coworker gave me a mostly complete MPCNC. The MPCNC or Mostly Printed CNC is a inexpensive open source CNC platform. My coworker was having trouble getting it working and opted to purchase a premade CNC machine instead. He offered it to me and I happily accepted.

This is what it looked like when he brought it in.

It was mostly working as it stood. I was able to power it on and move it around using the web interface from the ESP32 based FluidCNC controller. While it did move, there were some issues. The trucks would sometimes chatter and skip around. I suspected that it wasn’t quite square, so once I got it home, I took it completely apart and followed the instructions to rebuild it.

When I received it, it was mounted on an MDF board. I expanded the footprint of the machine a bit and mounted the feet at the very edge of each corner.

From there, it was just following the directions and reassembling everything.

After tweaking the config file for FluidCNC to enable the limit switches I started testing. I could jog the machine back and forth and the limit switches were working. I found a test gcode file of a crown that I uploaded to the controller and ran.

Everything looked good, so I replaced the tool holder with a pen holder.

It works!

I’ll need to pick up a suitable router next and try to cut something.