So I got my tortion box table done for my mpcnc. It is 4’ by 3’. I am going to build some drawers for the base later. It is made of cheap 3/4 particle board with the ribs 3" thick all pocket screwed together. It is HEAVY. Using my starett straight edge in the center(24") I can’t get my 1.5/1000" feeler guage under it 
Gonna get on putting it together now! Everythings already printed.
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So much nicer than my tables…
For those who have used wire loom for cable management I am using 24/4 wire for my extentions, should I get the 1/4 inch or 3/8? I saw it recommended on the forums here over a cable chain and I have never used the PET stuff before. I was looking at this https://www.amazon.com/Wang-Data-Black-Braided-Cable-Sleeve/dp/B01M3SG5P7
I sell 3/8" in the shop, It will expand up really far. As is I think it would fit 2 of those wires and not look like a Python that swallowed a small goat.
That looks really nice!
I built a torsion box for mine too. They definitely make the machines real heavy really fast. I’m hoping to get a stand built for mine this weekend. I was just leaving mine sit on an old table saw when I first set it up. I sold the table saw, so now it’s just sitting on some saw horses.
My wife is getting tired of helping me lift it, so I need to get it back on wheels
Oh yeah, my top is about a sheet and a half of particle board. With the machine on top it would be a beast to move.
Heh, you should try moving a 5 foot by 9 foot torsion box!
Ugg, I think I got a hernia just thinking about it.
In other news just so I can complain I finished up wiring my mpcnc (took forever, I now hate crimping dupont connectors!) I coudn’t get any steppers to work. Hmmmm…perhaps I should have check which coil wires were pairs. I stupidly just assumed that the side by side ones were pairs on the stepper motor. NOPE! Not so. Here I go undertaking a rewiring. (I should have just bought the wiring from the store, but I already had a crimper and connectors, how hard could it be… oh, series, I can do that… I HATE YOU WIRING!!!)
You can rewire the DuPont’s without crimping on new ends. I’ve found that the wire makes a big difference.
Maybe we can share some tips. My process is this:
Is that what you do?
I wedge the connector into the crimper, then stick the wire in.
Yep that is pretty much exactly what I have to do. I see why I have seen people using the cat5 cables in their build. Those seem so simple (although I do remember getting super frustrated at those years ago when I crimped my first one, so perhaps it is a skill thing)
Sad to say it looks like I burned out my arduino mega. I disconnected everything from my ramps board, and then hooked up just the z axis so I could test it out. It still wasn’t moving which I thought was weird so I plugged in my laptop to the arduino while the ramps was plugged into 12 volts. The usb in my laptop went out and my computer said that there was a power surge on the USB and it was trying to draw to much power.
That seemed weird to me so then to the ramps I took out the jumpsers from the 11 amp to the 5 amp side and only plugged it into the 5 amp side, and then reflashed the arduino with the latest t8 firmware that doesn’t have the extruder and heated bed. Then I went back outside and tried it again, only off the 12 volt and still couldn’t get the z axis to move. I again plugged in my laptop to the arduino and I got the same USB message, and then it started smoking so I quickly unplugged it. Now when I plug in the ramps to 12 volt the screen slowly pulses dim and bright. I tired another ramps board and it does the same thing. This makes me think it isn’t the ramps and is the arduino. I just ordered another one off amazon. Two days is tooooo long.
This is all my own electronics that I already had, I didn’t buy any from the store.
Close to how I do mine.
lol
that sounds more like my experience now
Ok, I wan’t to do a sanity check with you guys that I am wiring this correctly. Here are the wires from my stepper motor. The colors are black, red, green, blue (in that order). When I use my ohm meter I get resistance between black and green, and red and blue. I assume those are the coil pairs.
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Into the ramps board I have listed 2B 2A 1A 1B. I have plugged in Black to 2B and Green to 2A assuming that the number 2 corresponds to a coil. And then Blue to 1A and Red to 1B.
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Does this seem right? I am only doing the Z axis right now. Will deal with fixing the series wiring after I can get Z right.
PS Also, here is the mechanical parts all set up. I probably should have stuck to only 1 or 2 colors 
But I was printing other stuff in between MPCNC part and was too lazy to change filament.
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Sounds/looks right. If you wire it wrong you should not be able to fry your board. if it doesn’t move just stop and try again. Make sure to set your driver voltage before you try and move it as it is more than 2x’s to high from the factory.
+1 for looking right.
The coils should have some resistance, but not completely open. I like to test by just shorting the red/blue, the motor should be harder to turn if you got a coil.
You should be able to see if your arduino has a problem without the motors though. If you have an LCD, then it should be displaying stuff. If you’re using repetier or something from a laptop, then it has some hand shaking, and it should say connected. If you send it an “M119” through the console, it should respond with the status of the endstops (even if you don’t have them enabled, AFAIK).
Thanks, I turned the pots down to vref of .41 volts. My steppers are only .9 Amps. I was helping another guy with this steppers a while ago and we just plugged them into the drivers. When we figured out they were to high I checked on and its vref was at 2.4! They were also .9 amp steppers. Needless to say we had to replace that stepper.
I tried that as well as checking the ohms and jumping green to black, and then trying red to blue, both gave more resistance as I tried to turn them by hand. Thanks!
Finally got is running!!! It turned out I had a bad ramps and a bad arduino. Well, that is all sorted and I now have an extra arduino and 1 extra ramps left. I had some major issues with the wiring. Ended up that one of my crimps was bad, but it broke after I had tested that axis while I was putting the sleeving on. That took me a good 2 hours to diagnose. Anyways…here is my first test!
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I decided to “draw” something other than the crown for my first thing since I wanted something that my friends would think was cool (yeah, I am vain like that, and yeah, I’m geeky like that).
Here is the finished table (I don’t have the spoil board properly in there yet, I am thinking of t track)
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And then last this is how I have it wired up temporarily.
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So my MPCNC is pretty jittery and while I was able to use it to draw it didn’t really do that great of a job. Here is a close up of part of the picture that I printed. Each line was supposed to be drawn over itself, and you can see that I am getting a double line where the cnc slipped. Also it seems really jagged.
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The center rails didn’t really stay square with the outer rails, so I checked the outer rails for square and it was about 5mm out of square. I decided to take it apart and reput it together as square as I could. I used a turnbuckle that I printed from thingiverse, it worked pretty good, after a couple of prints. https://www.thingiverse.com/make:376442
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I got it now square withing 1/2 mm. Now tomorrow I am going to redo the center portion really making sure that it is square. I probably should have done this all much more carefully from the beginning.
