I decided to start building a Lowrider as I have a Ron Paulk workbench and the Lowrider will make a pretty good accessory for it. Since there doesn’t seem to be a huge number of builds yet I think for phase 1 I am going to stick to the design exactly and later I will try to tweak and tune. The ultimate goal is to build something from Opendesk, but that’s down the road.
I started by visiting my local Metal Supermarkets and picked up some 304 Stainless round tube with a 0.065" wall thickness. They actually have two surface finishes and I went with Ornamental 600 grit, the other choice was brushed. It was quite expensive at $0.388 CDN per inch but it’s local and the service is good. I got it home and checked the OD to see what kind of tolerance I could expect. To my surprise it measured 0.875" on the nose. Whoops, back tomorrow to get the real stuff, I hope this isn’t a sign for the build, wish me luck!
I went back to Metalsupermarkets to replace my tube and ended up with 180 grit brushed. I would have preferred to use the 600 grit with a nice polished look but they only had the 1" in brushed 180 grit. Does the surface finish makes a difference?
I have finished printing all the parts. There are a grand total of 75 including the ramps case and I found the Lowrider 3D parts easy to print. I printed them using Ryan’s recommended settings at 40 mm/sec and they turned out fine. I print in the garage and the weather is getting colder here. I find that if I print with an ambient temp under 15 degrees C (59F) the parts are more likely to warp though.
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I have also started cutting the plates on my MPCNC but this is where I ran into some trouble.
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I decided to use 9mm Baltic Birch plywood cut with a Yonico 1/8" ball end router bit but as you can see I ran into a seemingly common problem where the router would rip into the plywood as you can see above. At first I thought the problem was the two flute bit but it tuned out that some of the bearings in the MPCNC were not touching the surface of the conduit and the router was just a bit too loose. The assembly instructions stress not going too tight and I guess I just went too far the other way. I stripped down the MPCNC and while I was at it I added the T8 leadscrew.
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I did discover that it’s important not to tighten the T8 nut completely, in my case the nut is slightly offset to the mounting face but by tweaking the M3 screws I found I could control the backlash on the nut. After making these changes and properly adjusting the bearings I could finally cut plywood with the Yonico router bit. I can recommend the T8 leadscrew update, it’s a good upgrade.
