Hello:
As most of you know, I have been working on the Wood Robot
project for the Research and Development Committee. Tim Cranmer
asked me to provide a description of the Wood Robot.
The Wood Robot is a Computer Numerically Controlled (CNC) wood
carving machine. Basically this CNC machine uses a router to carve
shapes in wood or other soft materials. The Wood Robot was
designed by Andrew Cilia. Andrew has four versions of the Wood
Robot. The first version uses three stepper motors and a Dremel
tool to do the carving. A dremel tool resembles a dentist drill
and is for light duty work. The Wood Robot is designed so that
more stepper motors can be added and by working in parallel use a
large router to do the carving. The wood Robot I built (With the
help of my friend Larry Godfrey.) is the largest Wood Robot system
available. It is built using sets of stepper motors, threaded
rods, drawer slides and wood. Overall it is about four by four
feet and two feet high. This Wood Robot works by using three
stepper motors working synchronously to move the work (The piece of
wood to be carved) in the Y axis. Arching over the top of this
assembly is the "bridge". The bridge is about four feet long. and
a foot wide. On one end it has four stepper motors that move the
router in the X axis. The router itself is mounted on a small
piece of wood and is moved up and down in the Z axis by four more
stepper motors. All this stuff is connected to the parallel port
on a PC. The PC uses software to coordinate all eleven motors.
There are some applications for the Wood Robot. It can carve
an ares of 18 X 18 inches and two or more inches deep. The
applications include sign and map making to three dimensional
carving. It is possible to carve a large copy of the face of a
coin for example. I will post more later.
Robert Jaquiss
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