I got my printer on Dec 26th of 2015:
By Dec 27th at 10:42PM I had my first part…that part is actually still installed on that printer (it was meant as a LCD mount, but now it’s used as a wiring standoff)
Not sure exactly what day I started building the MPCNC (I could probably figure it out searching some old threads on flitetest.com) but by Feb 20th I had the corners printed as that’s the next photo in my archives:
Six days later I had a center section:
By March 10th I appear to have pretty much all the parts ready:
But…that black filament was absolute trash. I had parts crack across layer lines and break while they were just sitting on my desk a day after printing.
I was on a crazy tight budget at the time. My wife was not very happy about me spending money on the MPCNC…but she was curious enough and impressed with seeing it come together so she didn’t complain and let me keep going. But that lousy black filament slowed me WAY down. I was also having some extruder issues with my printer.
But by March 13th I had a first test assembly:
And realized my plans were too big. I needed it that size to cut 20"x30" sheets of foam board…but I didn’t have room to set it up and work on it at that size! So scaled back to get it working while tried to get my shop cleaned up enough for the fullsize machine:
Since I didn’t trust any of the black parts…and was now sure it had to live in my shop where things get kind of warm in the summer…I decided to reprint the whole thing in PETG. I splurged and got nice filament from Atomic for it too since at this point I had a good feeling it was worth it. I also designed some upgrades for the extruder on my printer around this time and got it working much better.
April 30th I had all the parts reprinted in PETG and started wiring. I had my first moves late that night before I went to bed:
Sunday May 1st 2015 at 6:15PM I did my first “real” test with a pen and made my daughter a penguin:
May 3rd I mounted a dremel with a dremel grinding bit and tried engraving dollar tree foamboard:
By Saturday I had successfully used the dremel to carve a coaster for my boss…he still uses it daily:
May 13th I started experimenting with David’s needle cutter:
But spent most of that weekend cleaning out my shop to make room for the big table.
I could go on…but…the rest is documented in other threads already 