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One neat project on display was a wire EDM mod for Creality printer. rackrobo.io and a mini belt printer(4 in wide 6in long belt)
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Yeah, their nano lightsaber EDM was cool!
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The brain trust melding minds and refilling.
Our fearless leader making his sticker investment worthwhile.
ZenXY in lure mode.
Dave’s spectrometer pi camera setup.
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Vance came by the booth. He is a knife maker and has a professional CNC in his garage. He showed us his work and it is crazy.
Carved in stainless steel. Really impressive. We tried to help him with advice on which printer to get.
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The ZenXY worked better this year. Having the default home and play sequence was way less work for me. It was moving pretty much the whole time. When I wasn’t at the booth, Jamie restarted it or combed the sand if it needed it.
What I needed to do better was have an sign or illustration that the sand table is a DIY project made on the CNC kit. We had to give a speech to communicate that 1) You can’t just buy the ZenXY, 2) You can build or buy the CNC (which is who V1E is).
The packing tape did a great job keeping the powder in the table. The homing sequence worked almost every time (it failed once, then the ball was close to the start before homing). I forgot the steel ball during setup day, so I need to remember that next year (I’m hoping I will see this post next April).
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That’s a bit of an understatement. The ZenXY has an effect like a high gravity field on passing people- they divert into an orbit around it and are all curious about it.
Yes, this. It’s a message that starts to resonate when you walk through…
- This cool table was made using those cool CNC additive and subtractive tools down there on your left.
- The cool CNC machines helped make each other.
- This is really affordable, approachable, and has a great community . Plus a sponsor who fosters the great community.
I thought watching an M8 nut do it’s dance around the sand was pretty cool in its’ own right, though. Maybe not as visually appealing as the smooth patterns from the ball- but intellectually stimulating regardless.
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It was great to meet @makerjim, @Ryan, jamiek, azab2c, jeffeb3, @dwkisker at the booth for the time I was there on Saturday. It was good to visit about why we are all into this scene, whether for cottage industry production, or the adventure of building, or the hope of completing the big project that is yet to be realized. It was fun. Thanks for taking time to talk.
As I was at the booth between my several walks around the show, several attendees stopped by to look at the zenxy and the v5 printer. The zen was by far the interest magnet, but the v5 was more like a sleeper and once folks realized it was built by bootstrapping a 3d printed cnc to mill aluminum parts many were awestruck with it. This happened while Ryan was getting the millmage personalized tour Saturday afternoon. A few stopped by stating they had built or were in the process of building lowriders, but many were asking where to buy a zenxy or zenxy kit. The explanation that one could be built into their dining room table, by purchasing the kit hardware, printing some parts, and doing some work was disappointing for some, while several builder’s eyes lit up as their significant other requested they make one. It will be interesting to see how many actually follow through on that and it was fun to talk about the systems and possibilities.
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Anyone check out the Voron Cascade? I saw a couple YouTube shorts and pictures of it and it looks cool.
I wish I had. I saw vorons idex 600x600x600 build area system with 2 different core x y hot ends contributing to a 2-color print.
Peopoli had motorless magnetic levitation linear drives that are crazy fast, but their printer i saw was at the chameleon booth. Chameleon had their multi color setup that I liked.
A few ercf systems were there a long with prusas head changing system with 6 hot end tools that detached and their mmu system.
Fun to meet them and have a chat. I will say it works far better than I expected. I expected it to work just really slow or something…not the case. I will be getting one. The second I think of something fun to make, I will 100% get a set-up. I gave it a test run by hand it at flows right through it, they had a demo running with a ~1 1/2" AL block and it was just shaving the surface down. Even had a setup for tapers running.
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What about aluminum sets for your v5!!!
Nah, lots of holes to drill and re-feed the wire. I need to bring the price down, that will cost way more. This thing is more for high precision.
The part I am interested in is milling with it. You do not have to use the wire feeder. It would be fairly slow but we could mill super hard materials. 2d, 2.5D and 3D. I am not sure how material loss could easily be accounted for in the tool but there must be a way to do it.
So making some crazy parts out of a really hard material would be interesting. Tool steel, titanium???
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Make a LR mount for it. 8ft 4ft EDM? Woooo
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Joe from Lightburn showed us the slot and tab resizer tool. Which I didn’t know existed (and if I did, I forgot). I think this is a key advancement for sharing CNC projects, and it should be in MillMage when that comes out too. So get your DXFs ready to share with everyone.
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Yeah I have used this in Lightburn a few times and it is AWESOME! Would be awesome to have that in cam for CNC stuff too!!! Makes variable wood sizes a BREEZE
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I’ve always said that we need a thingiverse/printables for flat parts. The main issue is that thickness of materials varies widely from place to place (even in Denver, I can find several thicknesses that claim to be 1/2"). We talked a long time ago about trying to draw in some sort of feature that could be used to make variable sized slots. But just detecting which lines are slots is mind blowing 
.
We still need someone to step up and make a good repository for them.
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I have found laser files on thingiverse and printables before. But most I have used come from Etsy for cheap LOL.
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