I almost called this LR4 Build for Dummies but thought better of that. None of us here are that for sure. However, I will absolutely hold myself out as the poster child of “if I can do this, anyone can”.
My knowledge of how things work is quite limited when it comes to the brain and guts of the CNC machines, but I am able to follow directions quite well (tend to operate on high detail and am a stickler for accuracy). My requirement, it must work as intended when I plug it in. LOL. Probably the biggest reason why i have not purchased a 3D printer yet. None of them are truly plug-and-play. conversely, the MPCNC Primo has worked from the first day and I have never needed to tweak it one bit.
So today I began by unboxing the hardware and printed parts sent to me by V1E.
I admit i have jumped the gun in terms of posting the build as I won’t officially begin any real assembly until tomorrow but I guess I just feel like I did when I got my first erector set in 1970 and I had to tell somebody.
I will also attempt to video the entire build, something that I have not done before (i.e. video any of my projects) so hopefully that will help others like me who are thinking about a CNC router and are hesitant because they feel they do not know enough because I don’t know diddly sh!t and yet here I am.
All comments and suggestions are appreciated, especially if you see me really screwing something up. Thank you @vicious1 for your creation for without your generous contributions I would still be drawing fuselages on wood and cutting out with an xacto knife or a coping saw.
I guess I should have laid out my project objectives.
Build the LR4 as standard full sheet CNC Router
Build a version of @DougJoseph table and have that table top removable so it can be stored on its long side when not in use because even though I have an oversized garage, I am running out of space. LOL.
i think you should change it to dummies , we are all dummies at some point , if you say you never something dumb your lying. im like you can put shit together , but when it comes to the brains/motheboard etc yeah nah im lost , so will be following ur builld good luck
“When a wise man does not understand, he says: “I do not understand.” The fool and the uncultured are ashamed of their ignorance. They remain silent when a question could bring them wisdom.”
I forgot - this is intended to be a Yellow Brick Road build.
So today I was able to assembly one of the XY dealiebobbers (technical jargon). The instructions were a bit confusing especially to people like me that nitpick every detail, usually hours on end before even picking up part or piece one. In the instructions, the first end stop example we see is marked Z1 but I am pretty sure that we are starting out on XY0. I caught my error soon after installing the end stop switch. LOL So the next image shows the correct orientation and the tape on that is marked Z (not Z1). So I am thinking they were showing both end stops there.
If you are a dummy like me (and I say that advisedly), this easily could eat up hours and hours of thought and contemplation. But I promised myself , this time I was gonna just jump in and build without the usual case of paralysis by analysis that I so often inflict myself with.
So the first XY took almost an hour, the second like 10 minutes. LAMO. Will share some pick later and video for my fellow Ds.
Please feel free to post here and I’m sure someone will wander by to help (pictures are great). The Z end stops are pretty generic until they are wired into the control board. It’s just helpful to label the wires for those connections later. I hate to see this take an hour of your time!
From the two images above, you can see where I followed the directions and routed the end stop wires and the stepper cable through, but then later realized (after tying them up nice and neat) that they needed to go through more channel and out the other side. This is why, boys and girls, you should read the directions through at least once. Regardless, I am truly amazed of the inner channel for the routing of wires. How y’all thought of this, guess that’s why you are engineers
Now having rerouted the wires, and retied them off so they are not loose, I moved onto the next step. NOTE: I did have to remove the stepper ribbon and the two pairs of end stop wires previously routed per instructions as shoving the second stepper ribbon was near impossible. So leaving the wires loose even before pushing down into the slotted channel as in the first photo and then installing that Z first will make it 100% easier.
Other than that routing order of wires, there has been NO issues and the parts flow as easy as lava down a newly minted volcano (or maybe nice warm syrup on a fresh stack of hotcakes). I can already tell that this is MUCH easier than building the PRIMO.
I’ll have a couple hours tonight before the game, will see how fast this regular guy can make progress before the game break.
I am really impressed with how everything fits, especially the inner channels the wires pass through, In my opinion, the thought and effort went into this is unmeasurable.
The two YZ plates stand ready to serve, time to move on to the core
I gotta ask. Is that a printed and bound version of Ryan’s instructions? Super cool if it is!
I bet he could even sell a version of that with his kits, as I’m sure there are people that would rather have a Mk2 pencil and some paper over a computer in the shop during assembly.
es it is, i copied and pasted into word, arranged and resized the images to fit on 8.5x11 then used a spiral binder, for me it works better than 3-ring. It would be nice if there was a dynamic ‘print’ button with the online docs. But this worked just fine.
We have tried to do that in the past. The docs are all in markdown, and it is possible to have a format from markdown to pdf/doc directly. The issue is that it is just too much work to format things for the website and for paper.
But by all means, copy/paste/print them. They don’t look too stupid when you just print the website. But IMHO, I would much rather have a tablet with the instructions open than a pad of paper. Maybe it comes down to what we are used to.
The website has the advantage of always being up-to-date. Printed is fixed as at the time of printing. This can also be an advantage, if other things are changing, but generally isn’t.
Not so much lately, but I used to hang around a lot of DIY electronics forums, and PCBs would undergo revision and component changes, so if you bought all your stuff and didn’t build for a year, the current instructions might no longer be appropriate. I still.have some of those hanging around, come to think of it, along with an archive of the instructions that are contemporary with the parts I bought. (One project, I needed the wayback to find info on the revision that I had, don’t want to do it that way again, the archive is only the text, images need to still exist to see them.)
V1E keeps “old version” docs around now, but if you had parts for one of the first MPCNC machines, you’ll need some help. (Fortunately, you can get it.) Some of those revisions were pretty fast moving.
Keeping a copy of the current instructions is understandable, and probably good policy. My LR3 and LR4 were built with out much in the way of documentation, being as they were both so far beta builds, so I don’t know that I need documentation so much as a good memory and kind of knowing where I need to end up. Maybe a willingness to take apart something just assembled for a “oh yeah, first I needed to…”
The history of the current iteration of the docs is also available (in markdown format) in the git history. It is possible to download a copy of the parts and the docs on the same day and have a permanent record.
LOL - my tablet doubles as my NFL Redzone, MLB.tv, college football television in the shop. Picture in Picture only goes so far when I’m also trying to view the instructions.
Although I completely agree with the difficulties in keeping anything printed up to date. A lot of the different projects or groups I read try to deal with this in different ways, but printed copies are always worse.
Using the online docs also means the forums are open in a tab, and available for a quick search if I run into something I don’t understand.
When I pull the card out of my dashcam to review, it became painfully clear to me that when I’m behind the wheel by myself, I never shut up. I talk to myself, I yell at other drivers, sing along to the music… at least I don’t do that so much with passengers in the vehicle.
