Hi, my name is Rob and I’m living in the Netherlands. I’ve started to order and print (all standard) parts for this build about eight weeks ago.
I’ve been printing with different PLA rolls I had lying aroud, testing several suppliers on the go. For practical reasons (baseplate I already had in my workshop) I decided to build a 640 x 1200mm machine for now, planning to expand it later to 1200 x 1500mm machine. Luckily there is a metal supplier quite close to me that sells overstock materials in numerous dimensions at a fixed price per kg, €3,65 for Stainless steel. For 25mm fine grit polished tubing I could even choose from 5 material thicknesses. I ended up choosing 25 x 1,2 for the side and Z tubes and the legs, 25 x 1.8mm for the middle X and Y tubes.
I ordered belts and pulleys, steppers, bearings, electronics, power supply and 500w spindle motor, all from China, and bolted the lot together on the base plate.
I spent about € 280,- altogether, using bolts and nuts from my stock.
I’ve tested the electronics with the steppers before assembly and the system works fine.
Now I have to wire up the thing, add some parts (Z stepper, X and Y endstops, Z touch plate, cable guides) and do some testing…
It could take me a while, I’m moving to a new house in a few weeks and I still have to pack a few things
This weekend I fixed the cable guides, connected the main 12V power supply, Mega 2560 and ramps 1.4 board in it’s casing, emergency stop button and the 0-100V power supply for the spindle.
Now just waiting for a Z stepper motor to arrive…
When testing the electronics, I noticed a nasty smell and some smoke from the mega board… It turned out to be a fried 5v voltage regulator :-(( “What did I do wrong?” sprung to mind, but I could’t find any problem. Probably just a faulty regulator, it did work fine before. Going to replace that regulator this evening with a 7805 that can handle a little more power.
I was still able to test the spindle and it runs very smoothly and silent, better than I expected! I inspected the spindle thouroughly after reading some of the 300w china spindle experiences, but it seems the 500w version is built a lot better than the 300W spindle. all metal parts, no openings where dirt can get in and decent bearings at least. fingers crossed…
I’ll share my experiences with this spindle in the months to come.
The Mega+RAMPS setup (at least from China) can only-just run the RepRap Full Graphic LCD. My machine has 5 optical endstops too (I assume they take a small amount of power from the +5v regulator) and after a short time my LCD fades. Adding a heat-sink to the Mega regulator made it take about 20mins before it faded so that was better but no solution, so I ended up cutting the +5v input trace on the LCD RAMPS daughter board and powering the LCD from one of those cheap $3 regulator boards with a multi-turn pot set to +5v. They have 2.5A - plenty for the LCD. I’m also planning to run a Toshiba FlashAir (SD card with built-in WiFi) that are known to be quite power hungry >@100mA over a normal SD card. A different machine I built/own could power its 20x4 LCD from the Mega+RAMPS but the FlashAir wouldn’t power up the WiFi properly until I used one of those 2.5A regulators for it too.
