Unfinished sketchbook cover gift. Engraved MDF 3.2mm thick. Still need to finish the painting. MPCNC
It’s been so fun diving into the MPCNC Primo project. I am so pleasantly surprised at how well the kit works. I’ve never built anything like this before, but I do have some mechanical and technical background. As I got closer to finishing the build I was doubting my work more and more. It can’t be this simple… this thing is probably going to need tons of calibration. I’ll probably have to tear it all down because I did something incorrectly. That’s what I thought. I’ve never been so happy to be wrong.
The first thing I ran was the crown test with a sharpie. I limped through slicing in kiri:moto and the gcode I produced ran extremely slowly but it worked perfectly. The second thing I ran was picking a dinosaur graphic at my God-daughter’s suggestion and had it draw that. She was so entertained. It drew the T-rex about 6”x6” flawlessly.
I kept joking as I read someone saying here that I want to get to know my little robot a little better before I give it a weapon. The next day I put the Makita 700 series with a sharp thing on it and gingerly made it cut a square in some foam by using jog commands. I kind of wish I had a picture of myself all in protective clothing and gear with the stop button and a fire extinguisher at hand. No need. It simply worked.
I’ve learned a couple lessons the hard way but not the really hard way because I haven’t broken anything. Any time I do something completely new I run the gcode kind of “dry” (you probably have a perfectly good term for this). I zero the Z axis so it never touches the stock and just watch the X and Y run some of the code to make sure I didn’t do something profoundly stupid.
I’d say with the road so far, my biggest obstacle has been learning the slicing portion of the process. I’ve only produced code with kiri:moto and I still find some parts of it baffling and hard to find information that explains things at my level. That said, I’ve successfully made a few simple parts I badly needed for the MPCNC. Kind of wooden tabs for holding stock in place.
I’ve engraved a couple of guitar effect pedal tops with text much smaller than I thought would be possible. I learned to use the drag knife just barely well enough to cut a sheet of stickers for a holiday gift idea. The project I’m mostly finished on that I think will look the best and be most functional is the engraved sketchpad cover for a friend of ours. It really taught me a lot about how kiri:moto operates and the kind of files you need to give it to get the result you want.
Kudos to Ryan for this wonderful and well thought out machine. It is such a rewarding thing to build and use. I’m sure it’s going to be put to good use making gifts for my friends and parts for all kinds of things I do.
I really want to get some better pictures and video of this thing at work but I’m in the middle of the larger project of arranging my garage to not look like the island of misfit garbage. I will be posting more in the future.
