New Build in Vancouver Canada

Well, my build has only been running for about a year and a half, but I’m starting the upgrade to Primo! I had the upgrade kit on my wishlist, and my wife bought one from Ryan for my birthday! Unfortunately she misunderstood how much belt I needed and only got 1m instead of 4m :frowning: But I can wait for an aliexpress delivery since I have other pieces I want to pick up.

While there is nothing wrong with my machine, and has done great for the carvings I’ve put through it, I now know better the features I want/need, as well as some bits I want to improve on.

For starters, I never got the 3D printing side going, as I found a ridiculously cheap 330mm x 330mm x 420mm printer that I tweaked up to my liking. That means my ambitious 8" Z work height is wasted. So for this upgrade, I’m going down to the minimum 3.25" Z. I didn’t want to deal with cutting my stainless, so I went to the metal supermarket and got new Z tubes cut for about $20. That way if for some reason I want to extend my Z again I can use my old tubes. I think I’ll be able to use the extra length on my burly X/Y gantry tubes for some attachments. While I was there I got some aluminum C-channel for drag chain routing. The tape measure worked fine, but I wasn’t super happy with how they turned out on my machine, so I’m going to base things largely on this great post. I also dug through the off-cut bins and grabbed a couple pieces of 6061 aluminum plate to try carving.

While I like the drag chains, I have done projects where I need to hang long boards (carved a 5’ board in 10 operations flawlessly!) sticking out past both sides of the X or Y, and chains mounted to the surface would prohibit that. I’m going to try to push them outside and below the table surface to accommodate this.

Just wanted to put some of my thoughts down while I wait for parts to print and packages from China to arrive. I’ll be updating here as I progress. There have been so many developments and tweaks made by people on the forums since my last build, and I’m excited to incorporate some of that into this new one.