my build is far from finished, but since I am unable to obtain the conduit in the required dimension I tried the first parts with adapted metric dimensions.
It worked out good, everything seems to move nice and smooth, however I only printed the center and the rollers, and had to use some way to long bolts I had lying around…
for this I now used 20mm PVC conduit as it is common in Germany, I figured that the system will be able to tolerate more flex than am MPCNC or Lowrider, and I hope that with the bearings rolling on PVC that that will keep the noise down.
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I think I will order some nylon bolts as well.
I am thinking of fitting my zenXY in a 80x120cm pallet, with a decently sized frame around, so I expect the final system to be in the range of 60x100cm max.
In order to save on weight for the gantry I decide to go for plastic bolts, since proper ones made from Nylon would have been around 10EUR I decided to print them…
Here my current status.
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I placed all my orders for electronics, and mechanical parts I need so stay tuned
You can fudge the gap a bit by adding thin magnets to the main one to make it taller. Best to glue after fitting to keep the thin one from sliding off if it catches on anything.
So this seems to get a little bit out of hands…
I had the idea to create the table out of a used pallet, these come in 1200x800mm format here.
I planned to fill the gaps between the top boards and then do a cutout in the surface and fit a thin board under the cutout as the sand surface.
So with the help of my little assistant I prepared the top surface.
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with all the blocks holding the pallet together I have a max space for the gantry of 930x610mm, so with the clearances required and keeping them symetrical I could do a max size of 730x440 for the sand surface would be possible.
I tested that with sandify, and my impression is that the patterns seem to look not that nice if plotted on that rectangular shape.
What is your reccomendation, make the sand surface as big as possible, or limit it to a not that extreme rectangular size, maybe even down to a square one?
Yes, why fill in the top gaps if you are just going to mill that back out again in order to fit the thin board that holds the sand? Though it’d be pretty nifty to just mill the center down to a thin remainder…
Sandify’s patterns aren’t too bad with a rectangular area, though mine are not as far from square as yours. You can also tweak the code for Sandify to add some rectangular designs, so they’ll better follow the form of your table. You can also divide your table into segments that are closer to square and place patterns into each segment. Plus there’s always hand coding designs to display irregular shapes, such as the llama and dragonfly designs elsewhere in these threads.
Hi folks,
sorry for my absence the Weekend was quite busy.
The plan was to do a cutout in the surface and fit a thin board (glass wood) in the cutout so that the top I currently have becomes the “frame” for the sandbox. I am thinking if I will cover up the sandbox with some additional glass plate to stop small explorers from digging out the sand or if I will try to cover the whole Table with a glass surface. (still looking for affordable sources of hardened glass)
I like the Idea of a significant wide frame where thee would be place to have some stuff on the table without covering the sandimage.
Thanks for the information about the board thickness that worked for your builds
For the one I’m doing that’s going into a tavern we covered it with a piece of plexiglass and sealed the edges so beers spilled wouldn’t muck with the ‘sand’ (really baking powder).
