After much pain and suffering the heatsink for the steppers used to mount the break-out board has been drilled and tapped.  My first attempt ended in failure last night following a failure of two tools (my drill-press and a brand new 6/32 tap set).  This night went much better with a new piece of aluminum and a new tap set (this time a Craftsman from Sears).  I built a template in Visio to drill the holes.  I printed that template onto Legal paper, cut it out, taped it to the aluminum plate and proceeded to drill it out with the somewhat functional drill-press.

The process went much better the second time around.  The piece of aluminum is .25″ x 3.75″ x 13″ and was purchased from Metal Supermarkets.  For those of you in need of metal, this place is great (http://www.metalsupermarkets.com/).  Not only did they machine the piece to the right size we needed, but they did it while Wayne waited.  To top things off, they even replaced the piece that was ruined by a faulty tool (or possibly a faulty operator …me) for free!  You can buy online or from one of their local locations.

As soon as I get the file section added to the blog, I will upload the Visio diagram (in PDF format) along with other documentation I have been using.  I have a Micro ATX PDF as well that we will be using later in the process as we begin to get the controller completely assembled in the drawer.  As always, here are some pictures.

It took us a while, but we are finally back to work on the mill.  I had a few delays while I needed to do some work on the house, but now I have time again during the week to work on the mill.  Last week and into the weekend we were able to get the power portion of the controller wired up.  This evening I continued working and was able to get the break out board and power supply wire into the power.  Next up, hooking up the stepper drivers and using Mach3 to test out the controller.  Keep in mind that the pictures below are just for testing purposes, it will be wired a bit more cleanly before mounting all of this into the enclosure.  Check out the pictures: