So, we pestered Ryan from July 17 to October 7 on the Status on Lowrider 4 thread, so I figured it was only fair to start a new thread on the mods.
The ones I’ll be waiting on are:
Doug’s Hidden Belts Mod for LR4
Doug’s Kinematic Mount for LR4
Doug’s Parametric Table for LR4
Doug’s SuperStrut Mod for LR4
but - the one I absolutely can’t live without:
Doug’s Little Mod that hangs the wrenches on the side of the YZ plate.
Disclaimer: I hope this is received with the humor with which it was intended. I’m happy for Ryan, but Doug does a ton of great work with little quality of life enhancements. Respect → Doug
Dan - with the longer screws, am I to believe that we no longer need tall plates?
I HIGHLY recommend you build the LR4 as designed, and use it for a bit before you start modding it.
Many of the mods were considered when Ryan updated the LowRider. Many of the mods for the LR3 had significant trade offs that aren’t always in your favor.
I’m not saying you won’t get support if you have trouble with a modded LR4, but it will be much harder to troubleshoot and much harder to get a response because fewer people will be running with mods.
Definitely second that we should all be using it as is first.
We can’t assume that it’s “not good enough”, before even trying it.
I’m not part of the beta team, but from an outsiders perspective, it seems a lot of “quality of life improvements “ are already there, which is the whole point of there being a 4.
I wouldn’t expect all of the exact same mods to apply
Floating dust shoe has been a nice addition which does not appear to be included in the LR4 images (could be mistaken). Guess we’ll see what the designs hold once released!
I haven’t even looked at tall plate extensions, the LR4 gets about 100mm of Z as-is, and the standard plates are super easy to modify if you wanted to get with 200mm rails. Just the Z stop parts would need to be changed, and of course longer screws.
However with the extra 20-25mm of Z the standard design has, I dont know that I need more for my own uses. I might chase it down if necessary though.
Ryan made a tremendous effort to both listen and understand a variety of somewhat nonstandard uses and accommodate them where possible, with a very worthy goal of improving the new LowRider so that it won’t need a lot of remixing. As a result much of what I might have thought to tweak doesn’t need tweaked. I am building my full size Lowrider 4 without remixes for now — and in some ways this means what used to be really nonstandard is now somewhat “an option” without departures from how Ryan designed it. That’s exciting to me.
Ryan has acknowledged and pointed out that dust collection/dust shoe is very, very hard, and he has developed a good LR4 approach in which multiple affordable sets of printed TPU bristles can be in different lengths to accommodate different bit lengths and different depth of cut jobs. Snap out a short bristle set and snap in a long bristle set. I am excited to try this out.
About 1000 times, at least eight times a day, I have looked at the limited space down there, available to try to channel airflow where needed, and I am always amazed at how difficult the challenge is and how impressive Ryan’s solution to it is. Pretty much the only caveat to his current dust shoe for the new LR4 is that if you cut near the X-Min or Y-Min edges, such that the back of the dust shoe is off of your material, it will create a gap underneath that decreases suction, and the easy work-around is just to throw some scrap down on the left side and the front side of your material (that is of the same height as your material), so that loss of suction does not happen. I have not yet had a chance to test the new dust shoe but it looks really usable to me.
Back when I put printed “Peter fenders” on my LowRider 3, I took off the printed plastic part that holds a spare collet and both wrenches, and screwed it to the front side edge of my table. So that option is available for anyone.
I’ll reinforce this. During the beta phase, Ryan spent a lot of time thinking about the “why” of the popular modifications, and did work to try and address and improve with the base machine design to eliminate a need for as many LR3 modification as possible.
There are notable tradeoffs and negatives of some of the mods, including new failure modes due to the overall improvements in the LR4 as a machine.
Edit to add- there will be really cool user mods, though- for example using optical fiber to bring your endstop LEDs out from buried in the case to a spot on the machine where you can see them while using the machine. I expect a flood of really cool new modifications after these are out for a while.
Yeah, having watched the whole development process, if there’s a mod that was common on the LR3 and it hasn’t been rolled forward into the LR4, that’s likely because there’s a tradeoff that was considered unacceptable.
I would definitely be building one as stock, getting used to how it runs and then moving forward from there with modifications once I’ve used it enough to know that the modifications were useful enough to pay a performance penalty.
I’m glad to see the many responses, but my original post was meant to be tongue-in-cheek. A humorous expression of appreciation for the countless hours of effort Doug put in, not only designing solutions to increase the flexibility of the LR3, but in refining those solutions so that others (including me) could benefit. And for creating his videos to show the incredible spectrum of possibilities for modifying the machines to the unique needs of small shops and makers.
As excited as I am for Ryan’s release and the LR4, I was trying to take a moment and express gratitude for Doug’s work on mods that will now age-out.
So - thank you @DougJoseph. I don’t want the message to get lost. You’re awesome, and I can’t wait to see what you do with the LR4.
