After half a year I’ve finally drawn my first crown!!
I’ve had soooo many worries, issues and questions these months. I don’t have a technical backgroun, so the learning curve has been steep, at some points almost impossible to get over. I’ve spent alot of time wondering how to 3d print, to cut the tubes in a straight and clean manner, how to get plate as flat as possible, how to square the gantry, print precisely, screw the parts together - and so on and so on.
Most of the time you guys have answered - “don’t worry - get it dirty!” And finally, I’m soon about to get there! I’m so so thankful to both Ryan and all you people here on the forum, I’ve learnt so much, and you’ve been so patient. I’m really happy right now, this whole project has been something to keep my mind occupied when being away sick from work and having in rough time in my life - and now things are looking better - both CNC-wise and otherwise!
Soo - next step is getting this thing out of the living room, and into the working-shed, finalizing the wiring, getting boxes for controller and LCD, etc. You have certainly not heard the last of me
Edit: And please - let me hear of there’s anything visible on the crown that should be tightened/adjusted! It’s neearly square, about 0.5mm on 20cm out of square. I’m suprised on how square it actually is, the gantry and the moving axises are quite skewed still when motor power is off, but the plotting turns out well still… ???
YEAH BUDDY!!! Don’t worry about the details, just keep using it. There are all sorts of little things that could possibly come up later but until you have an issue don’t worry about things like a perfect 0.00000001" square. Just keep making things, break some bits, kill some pens, get some foam to carve. Get familiar with the new tool.
I’m keeping the MPCNC in our shed. (sorry for the mess!!) The shed’s not insulated - EXCEPT FOR - a room that has been used as a chicken coop. The chickens are long gone - now it’s dads playroom. I’m still far from finished - need to figure out a good cable management, with chains and such, and organize the room with tool shelves and such.
I used an old dremel endmill, a downcut single flute, for the letter carving. Turned out quite okay for a first try - I think I had the plunge depth too deep, I think it would have been smoother if I took smaller steps.
I’m really happy with the results, it’s suprisingly easy to get it working. Buildning it, and understanding all the technical details was much more a hassle! I guess now is where my woodworking experience comes to aid.
A questions for the wiser ones: the rectangle sign is out of square (134 vs 133 mm from corner to corner.) I guess now is a good time to look back into squaring the gantry. I think I have three options now:
disassemble the gantry, put it back together, pray to the triune allmighty, and hope that it get’s square when put together again.
using these manual square tools to square it up before turning on the motors
install the dual end-stops
Option nr 3 is the most obvious - but also the one I dread the most!! What do ya’ll think?
I built mine without the dual endstops at first, but found I was getting inconsistent squareness, so bit-the-bullet and switched to dual endstops with auto-squaring. The part I dreaded most was rewiring the motors for independent drive… In the end it only took about a day to tear the wiring down and redo it, and that was doing it twice. I reused the series motor wires for the “far end” motors and forgot to jumper the mid-cable connector.
I say just go for it! It’s a little pain to reconfigure, but then you can confident in the squareness of your machine.
The other option is to use the square to square to the gantry, then attach hard ends tops to the conduit. Then you can simply push the axis up against the end post when you power up and you should be good to go.
Wow - you gave me a great reason for not wiring up the dual end-stops!! This seems super easy to implement. Honestly, I think I’ll go with your solution. Right now, I feel like I want to put the MPCNC to use, and make stuff. I’ve spent sooo much time fiddling with details, the end-stops can wait until the need for tinkering with electronics come back.
Excuse me for being lazy… you don’t have the STL for these stops - do you?
For signs and such, being out of square 1mm in 130+ is insignificant. No one will notice. I wouldn’t worry about it until I started making functional parts that need to fit together square.
I’m just using hard stops to square my Lowrider. Much easier than re-wiring for dual endstops, and just as effective.
If you can believe it, this is what we did before fancy dual endstops were available in the firmware. I still haven’t made a dual endstop configuration on my machines. I have tried to convince a lot of people to just try it this way, but the appeal of DE is very strong.
I understand the appeal very much! The fact that you can home precisely, split up jobs, easily repeat jobs, etc seems very enticing. But you might be able to do that, the hard stop way as well? Since the hard stop position would act as a constant point to zero on?
You can. The trick is, you home, then move some distance by jogging. Then you write down how much you moved reset the zero. Later, you can home again, move the same distance, and reset the zero again.
And even better - find a nice spot on the spillboard and put a mark there - and use the same numbers over again! And perhaps even make some nice gcode lines to that does this routine automatically. Would that be possible?
