Hello everyone,
This is my first post. I began my Lowrider 2 a few weeks ago as the first project for my new 3D printer. All the parts are printed and I got my box of parts from Ryan about 10 days back. Sadly, Amazon shipped my tubes to my other address (we are hiding out in our country house) so I won’t be able to complete the build for a while.
In any case, I’m planning to use a hollow-core door as my build table. I find them to be very flat and dimensionally accurate. We will see how it goes.
One other thing I did was to print the x-y plates from a file I found on thingiverse: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4314765 I really like how they came out but the are, obviously, not stiff enough. So, I did a bit of Rube Goldberg on them and came up with this:
Stiffness is much improved. The metal is 1.75” L-bracket from Home Depot. The threaded rod adds rigidity along the stepper motor axis.
Again, we shall see.
One more thing: I have owned a ShopSmith (a combination woodworking machine) for many years. It uses steel tubes to position the floating tables. They are exactly 25.4mm in diameter. I love my ShopSmith, so I am only borrowing one tube to test fit my Lowrider parts. By the way, Shopsmith sells these tubes in 5 foot lengths (extension tubes in their on-line catalog).