Procam CNC Wood Routers for Cabinet makers and Nested Base Manufacture.

Procam CNC use high precision Rack and Pinion on the X and Y axis on ALL our machines. We have researched the use of both Rack and Pinion and Ball screws and we discovered that for the woodworking and plastics industry the use of Ballscrews is prohibitive. 

The woodworking industry is probably one of the most dusty environments one will come across.
Ballscrews have an extremely low tolerance to dust but rack on the other hand can tolerate a great deal of dust in the atmosphere. On our machines we mount the X axis rack Underneath the machine so that any dust would have to fall UP against gravity in order to land on the Rack!

When Procam first started building CNC Routers we used Ballscrews. However after exhaustive and costly technical support breakdowns due to the ballscrews filling up with MDF dust we changed our design to use Rack and Pinion. Since this change we have not had one single dust related problem with Rack and Pinion drives. Compare the cutting and positioning speeds of a Procam CNC machine to the other Australian manufactured CNC Routers and you will see that the others are extremly sluggish.

One of the major downsides of Ballscrew drives is the amount of motor power used to turn the ball screw. If the machine is using 30% of the available power just to turn the ball screw this will not leave much power to cope with heavy cutting conditions. This is one of the reasons some of the Ballscrew driven machines will stall when a small amount of resistance is applied to the cutting head while in cycle. This may be explained away as a safety feature, but surly if it was a safety feature the control would not display "MOTION ERROR".


In a nutshell, we have used ballscrews in the past, it is easier to use ballscrews, but we have re-engineered our product to use a better and more expensive option.

Recently Procam CNC attended the IWF woodworking show in Atlanta USA and almost ALL the CNC machines we saw there are using Rack and Pinion drive. Surely if Ballscrew was the way to go this would be the industry standard. 
 
Read all about Rack and Pinion at our suppliers web site www.gudel.com
Procam CNC The Cutting Edge!