The hardest part of this build was coaxing real aluminum chips out of a hobby-class 3018, and the maker tackled it head on. The stock 775 motor was underpowered and restricted to soft materials, printed parts failed under high torque, and the first aluminum cuts worked but ran painfully slowly. The rebuild answers each of those problems: an air-cooled 500W motor went in as a spindle upgrade, alongside an all-aluminum slide for the Z axis.
Assembly began with a Genmitsu 3018 kit. The aluminum extrusion frame went together first, linear rails were mounted onto the crossbeam extrusions, and the horizontal axis received two linear carriage blocks per rail. Limit switches with roller levers sit on every axis. Power comes from a teal and silver Makita RT0701C compact router, and the machine also carries a 3D-printed mounting bracket, an acrylic blast shield, dual air blast nozzles with vacuum extraction, and an aluminum backing plate clamped in a drill press vise. A CAD-designed adapter block, printed on an Ender-3 style printer, rounds out the custom hardware.
The cutting numbers read as conservative but sensible in my view: 600 mm/min feed, 0.75mm depth of cut, 27,000 RPM, and a Yonico 2-flute carbide endmill. The maker tuned feeds and speeds toward a smoother cut and noted that lubricant matters for chip clearing. Results back that up: a hex profile, a slot, a two-slot wrench and a circular timing pulley were all cut successfully, plus a three-person portrait engraved into aluminum plate. The whole machine came in around $600, with the base kit itself listed at $199.
Some rough edges remain worth watching. Chatter left a poor surface finish on sprocket teeth, an endmill snapped during an early test cut, and the planned conversion of plastic parts to aluminum was never completed. For a machine this cheap cutting this fast, those feel like fair open items rather than failures.
Project by ericinventor. Watch it on their YouTube channel: