The Little Ripper

LowRider CNC Your Builds
1

Hiya, Sam here from Melbourne, Australia.

Starting a build thread to document my journey of a small CNC for home joinery projects—I’m calling it the Little Ripper.

I’m completely new to both 3D printing and CNC so this should be an interesting journey—and maybe a helpful one for testing instructions for those coming in almost blind.

I opted for the hardware kit as a small way to thank Ryan for his incredible design—and the added difficulty of sourcing everything here in Australia. I did reach out to some local fabricators about the aluminium plates but it would have been more than Ryan charges for the plates for the set up cost alone.

I have however opted to print the parts myself since I’ve always wanted a 3d printer and it looks like they have finally matured enough to be mostly set and forget. I picked up a barely used (50hrs!) P1S from a local shop here for $499 AUD (~$350 USD) which I thought was a pretty good deal. My hardware kit arrived in about a week (thanks Ryan + DHL!) and I’m starting to print the parts today.

The first thing I did was to check the calibration of the machine using the Califlower calibration tool. I went for this one over the Calilantern since the P1S has no option for z skew anyway. My results were within .1 of a mm which I thought was good enough to not bother with any custom g-code since I am new to this and can see myself accidentally applying skew correction multiple times by accident.

I think I have the correct settings for the printer but I’m a little confused since:

  • The instructions state: For newbies: the printer files downloaded from the links above should have these settings by default, but its best to verify.
  • However, it looks like all the files are raw .stl files and don’t contain any settings by default
  • The Open with Bambu Studio link doesn’t seem to work on Printables. At any rate this seems to just be a .stl file anyway
  • It looks like the Lowrider 3 documentation talks about .3mf files so maybe this hint in the docs is out of date?

Anyway, I think I have I figured it out in Bambu Studio by manually setting:

  • Layer height of 0.28 for the stock 0.4mm nozzle on the P1S
  • Spares infill pattern to Rectilinear
  • Sparse infill density to the Infill listed in the documentation (eg. 30% for the core)
  • Wall loops to 3

Happy to share the profile if that’s useful to others or pointed in the direction of a preset file I might have missed.

Will update again once all parts are printed.

Cheers :victory_hand:
Sam

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Welcome to the V1 community forums, Sam.
It looks like you’re off to a great start.

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Welcome aboard Sam! Looking forward to seeing your build.

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a couple of the parts have 50% infill, so watch for those X min and max braces.

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Late update but I got some friends together over a couple of weekends and have built the gantry.

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Assembly was extremely smooth for the most part. We appreciated the thoughtful touches like through-holes for screwdriver heads. We were often joking:

The Vicious One provides yet again

Next up is the table top, I managed to get a free MDF offcut from our local big box hardware store. Since this is just a quarter sheet size I am thinking I’ll just fix the rail directly to a single top. I toyed with building a sled or torsion box but I think best to just get something working to experiment.

I guess the tradeoff is that either your top becomes the spoilboard or you lose a bit of height having to stack a second piece on top as a spoilboard? Or do people just sandwich foam between the MDF top and the workpiece like you might with a track saw?

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We just stack “runners” in the height of our spoilboard. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Ah right, so just stack a strip on each side for the rail and the belts? Makes sense!

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Building an lr4 is the gift for yourself that keeps on giving.

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I keep saying that it’s really fun to build a lowrider as a group, and far easier to do the various parts when you can get a bit of teamwork into the build.

Awesome to see it put in practice for a community members’ build.

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