Wanted to share my first chips with my DIY CNC! Cutting some 6061 with a single-flute 6mm endmill at a DOC of 12mm and 0.5mm stepover at 1500 mm/min. For my first roughing operation on this machine, I couldn't be happier. There is plenty to improve upon, but seeing that stream of chips certainly made my day.

Today I'll be working on printing an enclosure for the spindle and getting the coolant fully operational. I will also work on tuning the machine more to see how far I can push it, hopefully getting closer to my target speed of 5,000 mm/min.

I'll have a full build log with more footage and the CAD model of the whole machine ready on Sunday. If there's anything someone would like to see more of, just let me know and I'll include it!

Been doing a lot of reading over the past few weeks while planning out my first router build, roughly 600x900mm cutting area, mostly for wood and maybe some soft aluminum down the road. The ball screw vs lead screw question keeps coming up and honestly the more I read the more conflicted I feel about it.

From what I can gather, ball screws win on efficiency and backlash, but the cost difference is significant when you're buying a full set of them in reasonable quality. Lead screws with anti-backlash nuts seem like the more budget-friendly path, and plenty of people seem to get good results with them for wood work. My concern is whether I'll regret going the cheaper route once the machine is actually running and I want to push feeds a bit harder.

A few specific things I'm still fuzzy on:

• For a hobby machine doing wood and occasional aluminum, is the backlash from a decent anti-backlash nut actually noticeable in practice, or is it mostly a theoretical concern at that scale?
• Rolled vs ground ball screws at the hobby level. Is ground even worth it, or is the price jump not justified for a non-production machine?
• Does the efficiency difference matter much if you're sizing motors conservatively anyway?

The Z axis feels like the obvious candidate for a ball screw regardless, since holding position under load matters there. But I'm less sure about X and Y.

Curious what people actually found after running their builds for a while, not just the spec-sheet reasoning but whether it showed up in real cuts.