I know Ryan designed this to be affordable, but I couldn’t help but be ostentatious. This is my first post sharing some previews of what I’m doing with mine. This of course comes with the caveat that much of this could be a horrible idea, so feel free to weigh in with thoughts or criticisms.
Since I’ll be saving weight with the carbon fiber, I just went with the steel XZ plates. I might change this later to have a quicker Z movement. The XY plates are just the standard MDF ones from the shop. I might change this to something heavy and make the XZ ones skeletonized 7015 Aluminum. Not sure if that’s a good idea to expose the rails to all that dust though.
Here is something I am experimenting with. I had the beam rails made out of 25mm 3K carbon fiber. I’m not sure how the wheels will wear on it, but I might switch them out for polycarbonate wheels or something of the same diameter. The beam is crazy light though. It’s probably like 1-2lbs, I’ll have to measure it when I get all the hardware on it.
Very interested to see if those CF tubes make it. The rail is not loaded as much as previous designs but I am still, pretty sure they will de-laminate quickly. The bearings still are a point load. Urethane wheels have a lot of give, so I would be interested if you could make those work as well.
If not that could be a fun build! Thanks for giving it a shot.
I don’t know if it will last long with the metal bearings. If it delaminates but is rigid enough. I will just remix the core I suppose. It will look cool until it doesn’t though. Haha
Yes, I don’t want to sacrifice my tubes just yet, and I don’t even have the table built. So I will just switch to 1" stainless pipe and print up all the braces again.
I tried them out and I can already see damage to the epoxy on them. I ordered pneumatic pipes that are 25mm OD. For the Y-axis, I am using a rigid conduit, which I am going to have to put a mask on, and polish it up a little.
I could see the bearings with no weight on them scoring it. I could also see getting chips on it and causing the weave to split. I was going to just sacrifice them, but I don’t want to trash them just yet. I might try, as you mentioned, urethane bearings, I’m going to have to save that for when/if I have time for the remix of the core.
My project has been moving slowly recently, I had a bunch of things pop up, but I made progress.
I had my beam struts cut with a fiber laser on 2mm steel plate. Now I just need to cut the 25mm pipes to length, then clean all the rust off them and put wax.
It’s 1400mm wide, so not quite 6ft. I wanted to cut a full 4x8ft sheet. I’m mostly using it for a panel cutter. They aren’t that heavy. I think the actual pipes are heavier than the whole assembly. After this, I just need to build the table. I’m open to ideas. I kind of want to design one out of aluminum extrusions, but I might just rough one out with lumber first.
Briefly looked at AVID’s aluminum extrusion based table leg kit. Cost to buy is beyond my budget. However their very detailed assembly instructions are free to download…
To save time/cash, ended up building a janky vertically storable 2"x4" based 5’x10’ sled for now. But expect my LR3 to mostly live on a 63" x 36" janky workbench.
I would rather design my own. I think that kit is solid, but it makes a lot of assumptions and for 1400 bucks, I can probably design something that is actually capable of being mounted to a wall. I will probably do something similar to what you did.