I just can’t get there I try and try but they keep getting moved rerouted or disturbed I have a constant mess and right now I have this
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That looks like any part of my desk or shed when I’m working on a project, I am a neat freak in terms of organisation, but I tend to leave everything I need in big piles on top of themselves! Therefore, things that are arrayed in neat tidy rows in drawers when they are not needed can never be found when they are!
Sigh! Another day of tidying up and staring into the space where the postman should be dropping my connectors.
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I use it a lot works great just need to get the wire under controll again I disassembled it 3 times in 2 days and now have to do it again to get it back together correctly.
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Heck throw a few zip ties at it and it might not look too different from how I end up using stuff.
I try to wire stuff neatly, but I seem to lack the planning for wire lengths and runs to actually implement neat wire harnesses. My wiring often ends up looking like a spill at a technicolor noodle plant. On a good project… like a spill that someone tried to clean up with zipties.
Even in kit builds where the wiring is pre-made, I can have trouble.
When I was competing in autosound competition, one of the biggest areas that I lost points in was wiring looms. (Sounded good looked… less good.) Even when I was extra careful and willing to rework everything after it was supposed to be done.
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Which might explain why in the time it’s taken me not to build one machine you have at least four (almost) working! 
And I quite like your technicolour noodle plants, mostly because they are yours!
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Looks as though I’ve hit a bit of a temporary brick wall; The pins and crimper I ordered appear to be from an “unreliable” supplier - an eBay supplier who had an unusually long delivery time, but that’s become the norm since Covid lockdowns and usually stuff arrives a few weeks inside that estimate.
Not this time, and the seller’s reputation has gone from 99% to 79% in the time I’ve been waiting, with thirty consecutive “didn’t receive item” feedback comments! I could of course get it all up and running and then fix the wiring later, that is what sensible people do, right?
But I’ve waited this long, and it’s not quite a year since I printed the first parts…
On another note - I have to address the looming CAM issue soon - as per my garbled musing/hijack here: Running Estlcam on macOS - #2 by bitingmidge
Will KiriMoto do well enough for this Mac user, or will I feel like a lone goldfish in a tank of piranha?
I think I’ll fill in my day putting locktite on grubscrews.
I think there are enough kiri moto users around here to get you going.
The smart ones learn from others mistakes.
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… I guessed that, and I hope the lack of topics raised of late means that it’s pretty straight forward.
Or perhaps they get sorted on the KiriMoto forum! 
And in today’s news:
> Your order’s in!
> When your order has finished processing, we’ll email info to you
> You should get it by 5 Nov.
But in truth there’s a lot I can be doing in the meantime, including having a week roaming around in the camper! 
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Now where was I?
Oh that’s right, I went for a bit of a drive for a week and when I got home I had crimpers, connectors and a yellow paint marker pen. I also figured there’s no point in having a “no budget” build if I can’t afford a couple of dollars for a paint marker.
“No budget” doesn’t mean I’m spending indiscriminately, it just means I don’t have a budget! 
I guess I should try to figure out where I was and work out how to make noises with this thing soon, after all I’m currently one year into this build, minus 16 days. Can I avoid pushing it beyond twelve months?
Stay tuned for the next exciting episode!
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My definition of a “no budget” build would have me limited to parts and materials I already had on hand.
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That’s a good call Tom. So I have a no budget table and I don’t have a budget for the rest!
I’m envious of your unlimited budget for at least part of your build.
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Well Tom, by your “no budget” definition, and in the spirit of Dolly Parton’s famous quote - “it costs a lot of money to look this cheap”, I had some automotive loom fleece tape lying around, leftover from my camper build, and I guess I’m about to find out why no one seems to use it in this environment! 
By some miracle - everything moves when I tell it to, and only one connection needed reversing! I’ve marked the sides of all the dupont connectors with yellow so I know which way to put them back during final assembly, which would be happening now if I wasn’t reporting in!
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That looks nice and clean, and easy to troubleshoot the connection. I had an old spool of 6-conductor shielded cable when I built mine, so I didn’t need to do much of my own bundling. I did add some braided sleeve around the stepper motor and end stop leads where they made the turn to go into the conduits. All my X and Y connections are buried inside the conduit and kapton-taped together. The Z connections are taped too, and these are velcroed in place on either side of the joint in hopes of minimizing any flex of the connection itself. I haven’t had any work themselves loose yet (fingers crossed).
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Well there’s today’s learning done! I hope I don’t need the heat resistant properties for my loom tape in any of the places it’s going, if I do it probably means I didn’t get something quite right.
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It’s a bit early to be smug, because I haven’t chopped the ends going into the board yet, so that one last bit of spaghetti will have to wait till tomorrow, but I have to say I am a bit pleased with how tidy it is. In fact I’m so happy with it I thought I’d share a couple of preliminary pics.
Although it’s the longest route to completion by far, I’m testing each set of pins as I go. I figured if there was a problem with one connection it would take a lot more time to trouble shoot than it does to turn the whole shebang on, move the axis in question a millimetre or two then turn it off and get on with the next one. So far so good.
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I only use kapton for this because I got a roll a while back when building 3D printer got ends from scratch and haven’t managed to use it all up yet. Scotch tape would probably be enough to keep the ends from sliding apart accidentally.
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Today could be described as “interesting” I suppose.
I have many questions to ask regarding the “700 (was 611) plate” and will save most of those for the next round - actually having the thing working may well answer them. For now, I have decided to use my something a bit less than 1 1/2" shopvac hose, mostly because it’s new and shiny looking, but also because with a new adapter it fits exactly onto @vicious1 Ryan’s stock parts.
Not much more than a year ago, before I had a 3D printer, at a time where I had never drawn anything on a computer, I would have simply grabbed an PET old soft-drink (soda) or water bottle and made an adapter by heat shrinking it. Sometime this afternoon, brain completely disengaged by way too much Mexican F1 Grand Prix at three o’clock in the morning, I thought I’d just do that as a temporary measure.
NOTE - PLA does indeed assume vastly different shapes if you heat it to the temperature that is necessary to make PET shrink. Thankfully with a bit of judicious patting and tooling, damage was minimal!
I understand completely why the vac inlet is oval with a flat spot on it, but sadly my vac attachment is round and quite rigid, and in less than the time it would have taken to search Thingiverse, I had a quite tidy connection drawn and printed. It’s vaguely complicated but it will do for now.
With that sorted it was time to mount the final version of the board and screen brackets and while I had allowed half a millimetre clearance between the back of the screen and my fancy pipe plugs, I chickened out and made a couple of spacers to prevent any future issues.
With only the board end of the wiring loom to go (twelve more pins by my count) I removed and adjusted the grub screws on the couplers and pulleys and gave them a generous splash of locktite before fitting the cover over the stepper.
About now I’m wondering just how temporary those temporary MDF flat bits are, but that’s where I’m up to. It can’t be long now. Can it?
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I’m not quite up to @vicious1 's wiring tidiness, but I aspire to be and I’m quite happy to leave a bit of scope for improvement. I can’t be sure but I might have the X and Y axes swapped - I get a bit confused about that standing on the side of the thing! If I do I’ll get a bit more practice I guess.
In my struggles not to make “improvements” until I at least get the machine operating, I haven’t found any way of tidying up the cabling on the Y axis. Everyone seems to just let it drop onto the floor which I suppose is OK if you a) have tiny feet and b) are not a clumsy old oaf prone to tripping and catching up on things.
I briefly considered rigging a drag chain, and this bracket was the beginning of that, but it evolved into something much simpler. The intention is that the router cable will run along side the power cord, the bracket should be strong enough to securely hold the power plug connection for the router (If it works I might even build one incorporating a socket). By mounting the power supply and running the router cable to the centre of the table opposite, everything should be tidy and out of the way - if I don’t like the sag, I’m thinking I might just tension the cable mid-span with a bit of shock cord.
There’s plenty still to do, but I’m retired so I probably won’t have time to work on it for a few days, so that’s the update for now.
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