This will be a forum topic to document the activities of those of us from the community that are going to the 2026 Sanjay Mortimer Reprap Festival.
It’s been an amazing trip for me thus far, having received a warm welcome and meeting kindred spirits.
We’ve built a LowRider4 CNC in a size of roughly 3 feet by 3 feet.
It’s equipped with a pen holder, and is being battery powered by a Ryobi tool battery that I brought from the US. (and also a spare battery).
Ryan supplied a Jackpot V3 board for the SMRRF raffle.
There are 4 known community members who have tickets to attend the weekend, and I’m super excited to finish meeting the local commuinty members.
A little while ago AJ and I walked across the street from the hotel and took a look at the larger booths being loaded in and set up. We also checked out where we’ll be unloading.
We have a small table tomorrow, so our load-in is in the early morning a few hours before the show.
Following that, when the doors open we’ll be off and going- chatting with the local maker community and all of the people who visit the show.
Hopefully everyone attending the show will fill this topic with interesting pictures and accounts of the show this weekend.
The tool battery that is clipped into the beam does in fact clip right into my Ryobi trim router. I have some 6Ah batteries that are too high a capacity to fly with and those give enough runtime for short jobs. If I recall correctly, you get something like 25 minutes at no load on the 6Ah battery, would probably be only like 12 minutes at heavy load.
Lots of jobs could fit in 12 minutes.
I’ve also thought of using some ideal diodes to make a hot-swap bay for the trim router and using a battery decoy adapter to bring power into the router. I’ve never tried to build that, it never rises to the top of the project pile.
I can imagine a setup like that be usable for portable job work, and we already know a 3’ by 3’ size LowRider fits very comfortably in something like a UK sized van.
It turns out if you put all those people Jim pictured lined up around a lowrider….AP mode falls apart a bit. Going to try and swap over to STA mode connected to a hotspot tomorrow.
Aza was prescient, some people seemed to gloss over it as an overbuilt pen plotter. A dummy router would help perhaps.
But everyone that did stop for a chat was really intruiged! I have been shanghied into liking to talk to people. Not mad about it, just confused this is possibly the most enthused I’ve ever been about anything in my life!
Welcome to my world. I based my entire education around avoiding public speaking and presentations. Turns out the *RRF’s are no big deal, I can talk to people all day!
We’d already been throwing around a lot of ideas between the three of us this week, but it’s interesting that several people I talked to today came up with some similar things. I’m just going to throw seeds into the wind whilst they are in my head before I go around the show proper tomorrow and get New Shiny syndrome real bad!
Printed rack and pinion Y axis (would need to be both sides I guess, which is overconstraint. But might free us from gravity…)
Dual core as a poor man’s toolchanger (IDEX for CNC…)
Dual beam - pretty sure I’m going to try this one instead of chopping my 8 x 4 into two 4 x 4s
Mostly Milled CNC - Lowrider gets us aluminum, can we use it to bootstrap and mill parts for a stiffer machine that takes us towards steel?
One which I joked about but we then entertained a little bit… collapsible/snap together/thread together beam?(!)
We’ve mentioned it already, but for completeness, an 18V powered machine - cordless trim router, and another tool battery to run the motion system. Why? Dunno!
Lowrider “print farm”. We talked a lot today about the price to performance, and comparing to commercial machines, and then kind of naturally drifted toward… “just build another one. or five.” for still less investment. I guess you kind of do this already Ryan!
Excited to see what grows out of this shotgun blast of ideas
A very good first day has wrapped up, and we were oh so politely told in very friendly terms to get out.
Starting to dig through pictures now.
Great enthusiasm, great engagement.
Pre-show, I said my success criteria for this visit would be if I met some of our community members here, and if if one builder or community expressed interest in building an LR4.
That was exceeded this morning when, before the show even opened, our next door neighbors at the show- a student run makerspace at the University of Sheffield - expressed great interest in building one or more LRs. https://iforgesheffield.org/
Our table is modest, and was too small to figure out how to use the table skirt. Bummer.
On the table in the picture above is a pen holder mount that our own @stevempotter designed and brought to the show.
Here’s another of our next door neighbors. SMRRF found a space to squeeze in my (very lately committed to) table. I think they figured we’d be well put next to other machine builders. Who doesn’t like to see the occasional movie bot?
When at the show, aside from the charge you can get talking about our community, seeing the show is a treat in its own right. Even sometimes finding one of us out and about.
The show moved a bunch of things over to the raffle table on the first day, and I thought I’d be able to grab a picture of the raffle winner of the Jackpot. Then, it seems they needed some good stuff for Day 2, so the Jackpot is now one of the interesting items for the last day raffle.
Not even the PrintNC can really handle steel. You need different routers for it that go slower and absolute stiffness that comes with mass and tonnage.
Consider holding off… am currently implementing an extra button in “Watch” that plays ~10s loop that shows the machine cutting wood, plastic, aluminum and plasma cutting steel. The videos are already on the tablet, I’ll just have it spin through a few juicy secs of cutting each material to help people “click” at first glance LR4 isn’t just a sturdy pen plotter.
Yeah.True. RPM floor is a big one (gear reduction?!). It’s a different machine entirely at that point also, if someone’s milling 8 x 4 ft sheets of steel, they’re doing something strange!
But the general idea stands without the reference to cutting steel - use a printed CNC to mill another CNC
I asked the gentlemen from Bondtech about when INDX for Core One L would be coming, and he very dryly but also very correctly deferred that question next door to the Prusa booth.
I saw an XL, and they had a Core One Without an INDX. So weird.
They also would not be pinned down on when the Core One L would be receiving INDX. They’d only say it would come ‘a while’ after the Core One INDX kits and pre-built Core One L+ units with INDX shipped.
