So I am only about two years late, but lets go ahead and share some stuff.
Meat and potatoes:
lowrider 2 kit, self printed parts. DW611 router.
4x8 foot capacity ( kinda turned out to be 51 by about 94 based on where I put my belt mounts, whenever I truly need the full capacity, i’ll move em.
Frame is 2x4 11ga steel. 1.5 inch pillow blocks, a couple of supports across the bottom. Slats are 2x 1/8th flat stock. Casters were left at work long enough I got to keep em, and while they’re nice, the REALLY made replacing all the tires expensive.
I’ve had my fair share of trials and tribulations, mostly because I’m like the rest of you guys, entirely too smart for the forum, obviously there is a problem with the… ok foot in mouth back to the garage. The first was building the series cable for the z axis. My most recent, and honestly year long plague of a problem, I think I have finally narrowed down to the power supply. Long story short, I would get random resets throughout jobs, sometimes in the beginning, sometimes half way through, sometimes, and I swear I’m not making this up, on the last pass, causing a machine reset, and the z axis to settle. I replaced the main board (although mostly because I ripped off the communication port being in a hurry in the garage) and this didn’t fix anything. I would mess with the feeds, setting the feed rate at like 15 percent, and it was still intermittent. Finally I went to put the volt meter on the PS, and was sitting there watching it like a hawk… as my machine performed its first perfect cut in months, and subsequently made it another 2 or 3 before the problems resumed. This time I just knew in my mind it was a PS issue, and put another 5 AMP PS on the board is parallel. This worked for awhile, but today couldn’t get it to make it 5 seconds. (and of course I was testing out Vcarve for the first time, so I wasn’t sure if it was the PP or not).
Suffice to say, my lowrider now has the biggest 12v battery that autozone sells powering it (not because I thought it needed it, just because I bought one for my winch last week, and why not). That being said, with dumb impatient me testing out some truly wicked fast feeds and speeds (with almost 6mm DOC to boot), I can say this machine has never run so well. This of course being because I’m learning the new software, hadn’t bothered doing IPM to MM/SEC conversions, and not understand start depth will cut 1 DOC under whatever you set it at, even if all the material is still above it.
All this being said, there really hasn’t been a problem I’ve had that hasn’t been covered on this forum. Sometimes it takes 1 of 2 things, either a little digging, or taking a little bit of initiative to teach yourself the rest of the thread so you understand what is being discussed as it pertains to your question.
I’ve even gotten near immediate responses from Ryan when I felt the need to email him, even if his response was Get your BUTT on the forum (ok he said “post a thread”, and nothing mean whatsoever).
Anywhoooo, enough rambling. Here are some pics of my machine, and some random middle of the night pictures I found scrolling through my phone.
