CNC + Radial Arm Saw

Having recently gotten myself setup with a legit CNC router — an Avid PRO4848 — I started thinking about what’s possible in terms of 4th/5th-axis machining. 4-axis meaning “rotary”… somewhat boring for my purposes… but 5-axis gets interesting. In the real world of CNC machining, there’s something termed an “aggregate head”, which basically means you have a cutting (or drilling/boring) tool that has its own degrees-of-freedom, beyond the machine’s own XYZ motion system. As with all ridiculously-cool things, aggregate heads are ridiculously expensive. It did get me thinking though — about mounting the business-end of a DeWalt onto my machine. Here’s a few renders from a quick exercise in thinking around that…

The first 4 renders below are a practical “what can I actually put together, practically” — which made me think of simple C-beam aluminum extrusion, mounted directly to the existing Z-axis. That would let me control the elevation/height of the motor carriage with the same controls as I do the CNC’s router. By adding a simple NEMA 23 motor, using standard GT belt & pulleys, I could easily add control of the DeWalt-head’s rotation around another axis. The remaining axis (motor tilt) stays manual for this iteration.

The last 2 renders are just an earlier draft, before I constrained myself to using readily-available components (in other words, I was 3D modeling a bunch of metal plates I didn’t want to have to machine from scratch). I also hadn’t yet thought about “moving the DeWalt-head up, down & around” yet… so basically, ignore them.

Just ideas for now. I haven’t actually put this together.