I’m still working on improving and tweaking it, but I’m starting to get really happy with the results produced with my mpcnc!
The full machine. This was before I had drilled all the holddown clamp holes. Total cutting dimensions are about 40cmx60cm
I’m using a Makita RT0700c. I don’t have anything to compare it with, but I’m really happy with the performance!
I printed all the parts with 3 perimiters and a 0.6mm nozzle. This should make the parts pretty strong and the larger nozzle also meant quicker print times. I think I was under 100 hours of print time fore everything.
First attempt at vcarving. Apart from an issue with the CAM (the line going from the home position to the W), it worked really well.
Very first try at aluminum! Here I also had some trouble with CAM (in the first picture, it didn’t cut the part on the right correctly), but the cutting itself went smoothly. I used 200mm/min feedrate with 0.3mm cut per depth. It’s not the most complicated part, but a nice test piece. It’s a “coin” for a shopping cart, you can attach to your keychain, so you can get a shopping cart without having to insert a coin (in germany that is quite common.) I originally designed this for 3D printing, but wanted something a bit more durable. https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3042876
I’m obviously still learning a lot and running into issues, but am already in love! The biggest problems I’m running into still is CAM with fusion 360. For some reason at the beginning it always moves the Z axis up from the home, then moves it down and into the workpiece and then travels to the first cut destination. Instead of moving up, over to the cut location and then down.
And in case it wasn’t clear, the things I still want to improve are not related to your design itself. It’s mostly that I don’t have a way to contain the dust and manage the cables yet ?
I did eventually also draw a crown, but my first pen writing test was also hello world. Guess being a software developer shows
In case anybody else stumbles over this thread and had the same issues with their CAM:
The issue where the z axis would raise at the beginning of a job and then lower immediately instead of lowering over the first cutting area, was something with repetier host. I switched over to cncjs and it works as intended there. Since this didn’t happen from the beginning, I must have changed something with the repetier host config, but I’m happy with cncjs, so I’ll probably just stick with that.
For the aluminum part, I had the workpiece placed right at the edge of the stock. And to cut the corners it would have had to run into a negative Y coordinate. Which is disabled in my firmware (not sure if I want to disable it. I left it as the default setting). Telling fusion to add some stock around the Y axis, so that all cuts are made in positive X and Y coordinates fixed this issue.
Marion, I used cam to make pilot holes that i then drilled out and installed the furniture nut in from the back. I made holes starting at 0 to 300 every 50mm. worked out rather well.
I put the 6mm drill bit into the router and used CAM to drill the holes about 1cm deep (the base board is 19mm deep). I then fully drilled them through by hand. This was the easiest way I could think of for getting straight holes with an even spacing. And I couldn’t let the MPCNC drill the wholes all the way through, since it would have then drilled into the table it’s standing on.
Haha! You just helped me get the thing working with manual control and i went looking for a “hello world” file to carve. I was pretty sure I’d find one, and now i get why ive seen a few videos of people drawing crowns… i guess it’s the “hello world” for CNC.
The magic forum can find it if you type “test crown”. The premade gcode is where you should start. That file has worked on thousands of cncs at this point.
I think I made the hello world by using the text feature in estlcam.
