(This is a work in progress…)

I’ve been itching to dip my toes into the beautiful waters of 5 axis simultaneous CNC and I finally has a product design that was just itching to a 5 axis 2nd operation. But, how could I do it on a budget? There is always the juggle of time vs. money and at the moment, I didn’t have a ton of the former. That said, the idea of adding two more axis to an existing 3 axis CNC machine had appeal and shouldn’t be too expensive, right? There would be a huge learning curve as most of my CNC experience is in the grbl and Arduino realm. grbl machines are fantastic for 3 axis work but grbl can’t do 5 axis at all, much less simultaneously. I was hoping for a somewhat inexpensive solution. I have built my share of CNC machines and I’m always up for a challenge. I started looking into LinuxCNC because I had a Mesa controller card from another derailed project that I had been itching to put to use. But I couldn’t find enough information to definitively know if 5 axis simultaneous was even possible with this open source software and relatively inexpensive controller. And since Linux CNC is open source and there are not too many folks out there trying to tackle home grown 5 axis, I quickly began to chicken out. But not before I bought a few new toys for dust collection. The first was a combined AC axis harmonic drive unit by Ratt Motor, which was going to be at the core of this upgrade. They claimed “zero backlash” but the unit was around $500, so this was impossible. That said, when it came in, I was very surprised at how solid this thing feels! I’m still dying to put this unit to work and will most probably use one of the harmonic motors to add a 4th axis to an existing 3 axis machine.

Update January 12, 2026

Well, it’s been some time and I have yet to create anything with this 5 axis machine. It’s solid and lovely, but the project I had in mind for it was more easily made with a 4 axis continuous machine and I could machine mulitple parts with way witha long trunnion.
The machine is a very expensive paperweight. I’ll add that I did figure out how to create cam using Fusion with the 5 axis continuous plug in, which is about $1200 per year!
The other thing that I figured out is that the controller software it comes with is windows 95 only x386. Ug. And that it’s written by Chinese engineers and not very easy to use. I did find a software engineer in the UK who wrote his own gcode sender for this controller and it works great. I think I paid him around $300 for the single license and he was kind enough to help me get the machine calibrated.