You and I both know it won’t… She’ll always be supportive of me, but it will quickly go from “that’s neat” with real interest to “that’s neat” with the deadpan tone… 
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My wife turns around when she sees something she likes out of it, like a MPCNC cut baby yoda sticker.
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I. uh… I need that. I assume this is what a drag knife is for?
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@vicious1 deserves all the credit for sure but still there’s something about putting something like this together and seeing it actually do what you imagined it would that is great for the spirit.
It looks as though you are on a path to success, hope to see some more photos as you move along.
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Correct you are
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Tinkering with the SKR Pro tonight, teaching myself pin (re)mappings and the like. @ByronM’s documentation was incredibly helpful for me as it helped me understand what the changes I was making did, and how they worked.
I remapped the Heater 0 output to be the new Spindle M3/M5 control, disabled the PWM function, and connected a solid state 40 amp relay to the Heater 0 output. M3 engages the relay, M5 disengages it now. Next steps are to configure the E-Stop trigger so I can mount a button on the table, sort out the Z-Probe connection and possibly move it to a new pin for consistency with connections, and finish crimping the Hitachi locking connector to Dupont connectors to ensure a solid mechanical and electrical connection at the board.
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It’s alive and moving under its own power.
Bench testing all of the control components ahead of time allowed me to document all of the connections and plug orientations in advance. It was as simple as plugging it in and turning the power on.
Up next, end stops, router plate for the Makita, cable management, and pen mount.
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Printing out the new X-axis gantry plate. I assume 75% infill for a lightweight router like the Makita RT0701C router should be stiff enough with 5 perimeters and 4 bottom/top layers. We’ll find out. 
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New plate is printed and mounted, and the router base is mounted in place. The end stop brackets are printing now and should be done in the morning. E-chain is in the print queue. With any luck and some work in the evening, I should be able to have this drawing within the next two days.
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My E-chain experiments were failures, and I was unable to find a good quality unit that worked the way I wanted, so I mocked up a design tonight, along with the pen holder.
The pen holder is designed to mount to the vacuum shoe using some zip ties around the base of the hose or fitting on the vac shoe. It is 12mm in inside diameter with a hole designed for a 4mm socket head bolt to fit snugly in and pinch the pen. Two zip ties will hold this in place, and it can be a permanent fitting around the vacuum port or hose/pipe attached to the port.
The E-chain I designed has a chamfered pin structure at 9.25mm in diameter, and slots into a 10mm opening on the next link in the chain. It has 20mm of width, 15mm of depth, and the inside face has reinforced slots on either side that support a zip tie to hold the cabling inside the E-chain.
The pen mount is printing now along with some endstop bracket designs I drew up to mount the Creality Ender 3 limit switches I picked up to the Y plate. The E-chain print job will start in about an hour or so, and I’ll run off a print bed full to see how they work out. If this works, I can then design the chain mounts to tie one end to the router and the other end to the aluminum angle. I’ll release everything on Thingiverse once I know it works the way I want.
Y-axis end stop plates. The angled piece sits against the edge of the Y-plate allowing the mount to sit parallel to the floor. This does not need to be adjustable front to rear, only up or down along the sloped edge of the Y-plate.
Tolerances were too tight for a printed part for the E-chain, so I revised the links to add some space, soften the edges to eliminate some minor over-extrusion problems I have in corners and edges that I have not yet solved, and allowed a tighter bend radius for the chain links.
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New chain links are definitely much better and move smoothly. I’m hoping to get back out to the garage this evening and continue assembling and wiring everything everything up with plans to get the first Crown drawn tonight if possible.
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When I printed my chain links, I printed them in the same orientation and they were a little curved over the whole length. I wish I would have printed half of them backward to negate the small errors each part had.
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I am printing each of these separate from each other, and they just snap together. The chain should be perfectly straight when done, but allow a little bit of play.
My design process in Fusion 360 was to create one entire side, then mirror it in 3D space and then extrude the connector on the bottom to tie the two pieces together. Now I can just print as many links as I need for whatever, and can scale the width of the link to make room for more cables, or scale the whole link up or down on a whim for whatever size I need.
Unfortunately, I had a print failure caused by a plugin in my Octoprint that kept telling me I was out of filament, so my batch of 20 only made it about 35% of the way through. I fixed the error, and have 6 links printing now so I can get them in place this evening and test the overall motion in the top cable/hose support.
My point was, if there is a skew to your printer (X is maybe 90.1 degrees from Y), then each part will have a small curve to it, and that will add up when you print 1m of them. If you just print half of them pointing the other way (rotated 180 around Z) then the skew will be +0.1 on one part and then -0.1 on the next, and you will get a perfectly straight chain. I didn’t do that. And even though my printer was as square as I could measure it, the results were a gradual curve.
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That makes sense. I wasn’t thinking of it from that aspect. I’ll have to check it out once I get a longer chain built. I’ll be printing off enough for two chains, one for X and one for Y, so I should have plenty of links to mix and match.
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Making dust. I still need to work on wire management, but I wanted to get it spun up to test it out.
A couple of fits and starts while I tweaked the start height and gained an understanding of why the system wasn’t doing what I wanted, but we’re pretty solid now. The source vector didn’t like to be scaled up very well, but it turned out OK.
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E-chain end-link design for use on the hose/wire channel and the Y-axis links. I need to design a stepper to E-chain link for the X-axis now, which I can do after I get the chain in place the way I want. I did revise the E-chain design a bit to ensure there was a rigid stop to prevent it from flexing in reverse. This should keep the chain rigid and minimize the need for support along the length of the Y-axis.
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I have not attempted to design !inks from scratch but I have made dimensional changes to designs I found on Thingiverse. All 6 of the designs I have tried required a lot of support along an extended length.
@jeffeb3 I do print half of my links in one orientation and the rest at 180° from the first set. It makes the chain flow straighter.
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You’re right, it will still definitely need some support along the length. I used to moonlight at a machine shop many moons ago. Some of the links we had were able to self-support over lengths up to 6 or so feet, even with the weight of the wiring, air lines, etc. Igus makes some really great stuff for mobile cable control.
I don’t expect a printed part to support any serious weight over a large span, so I am still iterating some ideas.
So far, I have been fortunate. Of the 25 or so links that have printed, the chain does not appear to have a curve when assembled.