Hi all! Last week I started down a rabbithole to see if I could convert an old junk prusa copy 3d printer I had into a laser engraver… Very quickly it evolved into me sending the laser module back to Amazon and building a V4
Due to size limitations it makes the most sense for me to do a 2x4 workspace, perhaps swapping to 4x8 in the summer when I can work in my car port.
I guess my questions would be as follows.
Forgetting my desire to go 4x8. If you had to do a 2x4 work area, would you opt for a short gantry and long work table or vice vera?
Has anybody played with hot swappable gantry lengths? (eg the ability to swap in a longer or shorter truss with minimal effort and maximum parts sharing)
I know logically it would make sense to just build the 4 foot gantry. But I also like the idea of being able to throw it in my back seat and take it to friend’s shops and I feel going shorter would be safer on the geometry.
(my build in progress, ignore the janky 3d printer table, it was built as a temporary doghouse)
I don’t know how “hot” swap it would be. But technically you could build 2 beams and swap everything back and forth. You would have to deal with wires each time and have to have 2 different length belts for each beam.
For the 2 beam option, I assume I’d probably want to have everything from the end plates inwards right? So that the beam can just slide off of the Z axis screws/rails?
The power/brain/wiring I assume wouldn’t be too hard to make somewhat modular so that each length has its own harness and the brain box can just move between?
I don’t often suggest this. But I think in your case it would be easier to just make a 4’ beam and just have long belts that you shorten the back belt holders on when you use the short table and ziptie up the excess, then stretch them out when you use your long table. You will lose a little performance when in the short version but not enough to be worth swapping beams all the time in my opinion.
Yeah I think that might be the better approach for this situation, unique though it is.
If I were going to build two beams, I’d build two full beams and, well then I’d have 80% of two LowRiders :-). That would include controller, PS, and wiring.
Yeah that more I got to thinking about it, even if doing all that you still have all the wiring coming from the YZ plates. And the core wiring would need to be one length for the short beam and one for the long. It just all got to be way too much IMO. Plus I thought it would make @Tokoloshe proud
