Here is my MPCNC that I have been slowly making progress on. I was going for an Iron Man color scheme. If you couldn’t tell.
The working dimensions are 19 x 19 x 3 inches. This allowed it to just fit on the cabinet I was able to snag from work.
I’m currently finishing up the wiring and belts and hopefully should be able to run some initial tests soon.
I plan on using this primarily for wood but I want to try my hand at aluminum and steel eventually.
I am going to build an enclosure for this where I can lift the sides to be able to run longer pieces on it.
I am quite surprised at how sturdy this is given its cost and materials. Props to a nifty design.
How level should the rails be with the table top? All my rails are currently +/- 0.2 degrees. I figured that should be fine but wanted to double check if I should try to improve them.
I finally got some time to finish the wiring and start on some drawings to test it’s performance.
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Here is a picture of the crown drawing. I ran it a second time over the first one just to confirm its repeatability. I am happy with it.
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I then wanted to test the accuracy so I created a simple design that I could check how square it was and its dimensional accuracy. everything looked and measured close enough. I’ll probably run another calibration test like this after I attach the router and can measure parts better.
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Lastly, I have seen some people draw Mayan calendars to see how it performs with lots of details. I figured I’d run something similar and more fitting to my color scheme. And why not throw a Star Wars one in there just for the fun of it.
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Overall, I am very happy with how it is performing so far. Next time that I have some free time I will be attaching the router and finally getting it dirty.
I had some time yesterday and was going to try some cutting but little one went down early and I didn’t want to wake the baby so I ended up adding a spoil board and cleaned up all my cables. I really like the tape measure trick, it was simple and cheap and looks pretty nice. I decided to add an upper bar to mount the y axis cables to so that it would leave the side open so that I can run long boards through without the cables being in the way. It also gave be a surface to mount the electronics onto until I enclose it.
+1 for the tape measure trick! I really like the way you have your spoil board set up. I might have to give that a shot on mine. The easy swap spoil board.
Thanks. I needed a spoil board and because I was going to use a thin piece of MDF I wanted an easy way to swap them out. The spoil board is a standard 2ft x 2ft piece of MDF so I just need to buy another $4 board when I need to replace it. Nice and easy swap.
I also plan on adding threaded inserts in the bottom plastic board and then have through holes in the MDF. That way when I replace the MDF, I can just rerun the through hole gcode from a close enough staring spot and I wont need to replace the inserts.
It is where you use a tape measure in the cable sleeve instead of using a cable chain. you can see the yellow of the tape measure through the cable sleeve in my pictures above.
This weekend I was able to finish my spoil board and add the threaded inserts and do some initial engravings.
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I cut some squares to check the accuracy and the 50mm square was coming in around 49.3mm. The others were smaller than designed as well. I’m guessing there is a way to correct this in estlcam but I could use some help finding where that is at.
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Other than the dimensions being off, everything else cut fine. Everything moved smoothly and looked clean. Now to play with estlcam some more so that I can try some more complex shaping.
I got around to cutting out a 100mm square and a 50mm square to check their accuracy. I got better results than the first 50mm cut because I found one of my belts was loose but I’d still like to improve if possible.
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The 100mm square measured 99.42 x 99.71 and the 50mm square measured 49.62 x 49.70.
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Any suggestions on what I could try to get theses a little more accurate? Especially in the Y direction.
Just for reference, I was using estlcam and using the standard starting settings. I ran these with a finishing pass to hopefully keep the sides as smooth as possible for measuring.
Try drawing with a pen, if the dimensions are correct we can narrow down the source of the error.
Also try a few more of those cuts your errors are not making sense. One is staying the same and one is double, it should be one or the other never both.
