So I go to use my machine this week and as I was setting the job up, I noticed that my router mounts had snapped. How many spare parts do folks keep around?
as for cause?
My shop has some pretty wide temperature swings when I put it together this past winter it was under 5c probably colder and through the summer it can get over 30c+ (41-86 freedom). I had a similar problem with my end stops they had a habit of breaking during cold snaps. I am guessing that during the summer maybe the router housing expanded with the heat stressing the bands IDK. The failure spot was always at the corner of the band and the boss for the fastener if I could have one request it would be for more fillets ;).
My house gets pretty cold in winter, and quite warm in summer, and I’ve replaced my Primo tool mounts once when I removed the Makita and installed the Kobalt.
I only ever broke one of the end stop blocks.
LR3 parts are a bit harder to track but printed parts are still mostly from the beta.
LR4 parts just finished printing, zero spares, lol.
Since I don’t do any of this stuff for a living, I think that a little downtime waiting for something to print or in the case of the printer waiting for it to arrive from the Czech republic could be well spent at the beach.
That is not to say I would enjoy that time!
I think that keeping spares of non-consumable items is a bit of a folly (unless you have stuff from other projects - that’s keeping ‘potential’ not spares) - it’s always the part you don’t have that breaks.
On the other hand, if something is breaking so regularly that you need to keep a spare, maybe you need to reconsider why, and modify that part!
The only two things I’ve broken are the same two you mention, the stop blocks and router mount. In my case, the issue was user error, not temperature, but my breakage shows these two places are weak points. My solution was to modify Ryan’s design to beef up both at the points they broke. They haven’t broken since, but I also haven’t made the stupid errors that caused them to break in the first place.
For the stop blocks (not the router mount), you might get better results printing them out of ASA, ABS, or PETG rather than PLA. I believe these other plastics are less brittle at lower temperatures, and the difference in stiffness should not impact the limit switches.
All of my mpcnc tube clamps are broken. They died in my air conditioned garage in florida. Pretty sure it was the humidity. I don’t keep spares though. I can print replacements pretty fast.
Yeah I was thinking of printing the stop blocks out of pteg. But I do think that I will print one set of spares of the stop blocks and router mount just to not stop momentum if I have a project going.