Made myself a Shapeoko house

Whilst waiting on some parts for my Shapeoko I’ve been getting bored, so I decided to make a house for my Shapeoko. I came along this post which looked kinda cool.

Many might ask why build one - well I have a garage not a workshop which means dust get everywhere - during the project I moved my unit to find this under it -

If it’s not from the shapeoko it’s from something else and I spend too much time cleaning up - dust boot would be good but these things are also very noisy a house will just take that high pitch out.

So I set upon my task. In the above thread it looked like an XL, I have a normal one, so measurements are allot smaller 76 wide, 74.5 front to back and 42 high.

Now I was originally going to put this in it’s existing home which meant I was tight on space - originally I was going to use 18mm ply, but opted for 12 - it’s plenty thick and strong for this. However in the end I made a table for this to sit on and could have used 18 - if I were to do it again I’d have sued 18…

I started off with a big sheet - and our local hardware store (B&Q) will cut wood down for you for free. I mapped out my pieces and took it to them.

Next step was to route some lips:

Then mark out the side panels

Corner jig time

Add a top section

Then do some test fits

<img src=“/uploads/default/original/2X/c/c68b0a9625e6e2762aea69df90e8cda68ca4c6c1.jpg” width=“375” height=“500”

At this point I had to ‘repurpose’ some shelving for a stand, join together, fit to a wall then join some worktop and fit onto.

I forgot to take any photos of the top assembly, and cut outs - but I’m sure if you can use a shapeoko you get the gist.

Here it is as it stands.

I’ve ordered some LED lights, a power brick and seals to move it forwards. I’m also in the process of extending all the electrics so that the control board will sit outside the unit and the router cable will feed in. This will allow the inside to get extra dusty.

I might fit dust extraction later on, but thats a big maybe.

I’ve spend about £60 to get it this far but had allot of fun doing so.

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Nice work. CNC life is so much better with an enclosure, isn’t it…

Nice work!

Are you planning to light up the enclosure with the LEDs that you ordered? If so, I highly recommend painting the inside of your enclosure white. When I built my enclosure, I discovered that the LEDs didn’t provide as much light as I had hoped. Another user recommended I paint the inside with a high gloss white, and the difference was night and day.

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Thanks @Tshulthise - it’s pretty cool - just can’t wait to use it.

@RoguePirin yeh I have 2 60cm, 3000k, 800lm stip lights that are mental bright - I use three of these in my garage so I’m not sure I will need to but I really like the idea of painting it white inside. I might do it anyway though, ruddy good idea.

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It depends upon what type of LED’s are on the strip. If you buy 5630’s, then you’ll get about 2 times more light compared to 5050’s, and around 7 times more light than 3528’s. For my first enclosure I used a full 5 meter roll of 5630 LED’s (300 total) and it was almost too much light. That strip outputs somewhere around 5000 Lumens – roughly the equivalent of three 100 Watt incandescent bulbs.

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I made a Sketchup Design if you want to look at my enclosure. https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/model.html?id=eccb26f7-2a5f-472c-bfad-bcc0068cf507

This model is made for a 2x4 i have another model that i will upload soon that was made with 1x4.

The mrs was out yesterday so I spent some time working on the wiring, tidying it all up for when my new control board comes and I also added the lighting - the picture only show the one light, but there are two.

It’s now nice and bright in there and none of the wires slip into the tracks.

My next job is to replace the control board when it arrives, seal the windows with putty, add some dust seals around the main joints. I’m also going to use the wire control hole as a rust extraction hole to take the cost out of the air inside the box.

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