WARNING LONG RAMBLING POST
Covid19 has meant I am now remote working. after a 2 year hiatus where my two boys, wife and dog have kept me suitably busy I am now sat by my MPCNC which has languished here for almost 3 years in my office at the end of the garden.
Anyway, over the last few days i did an assessment of what was left and began making some decisions. I think when I downed tools on the MPCNC, I was going to try dual stops and auto squaring straight away but hadn’t really finished the wiring of the steppers. I am using cat 5 for the wires but using two strands per half of a stepper phase. This hopefully double the current handling as cat 5 wires are very thin.
Yesterday I figured out the right hand rule for my particular build and wired it up as parallel x and y (not auto squaring, baby steps now) and I’ve tested that the axes all move in their respective correct directions from home +Z being into the bed and the rest dictated by the right hand rule.
Unfortunately due to poor plastic choices, a previously badly calibrated Anet A8 3D printer and worst of all, alot of ultra violet light over time coming through my shed window many of the parts are cracking. especially those which hold the z axis rails. they are not that strong especially when you forget that and are trying to release a router bit which was a bit jammed in without going to the trouble of sliding the z carefully out of the gantry by undoing the coupler (everything is 2020 with hindsight).
My 3D printer currently has a 1mm nozzle in it as i was printing some aero infills for my Nissan leaf by Paul Kennett. I don’t know if i should just try and reprint these broken bits of the gantry again. my MPCNC is a mishmash of original Cura default blue, bad black PETG (i think it’s PETG , it never printed nicely for me) and more recent white PLA which is good stuff and was before i switch from a 0.4mm to a 1mm nozzle.
I bought some cat 5 sockets which are for SMT to PCBs. They were cheap and i bought some breakout boards which made the soldering of the stepper wire easier. I didn’t have enough of these breakout boards and then today realised coming back to it after two years that the male header pins for stepper wires have the same pitch as the pins on the bottom of the cat 5 sockets. This meant using a bit of white tac (to hold the fixture whilst soldering) I was able to complete the wiring without the PCB breakouts and it’s probably even neater.
Being that it is such an old build i still have the old threaded rod for the Z axis and not the leaded rod that the newer builds use. i need to tweak the software settings to get back my z scale so that 10mm on my motion on the ramps board makes the router bit actually travel 10mm.
If anyone knows what the old settings are or can point me to the file with them in that would definitely help.
Cracking plastic aside, I think its not far off a test crown. To do anything with the actually router i may have to reprint some the the gantry and work out the z scale issue. Not a million miles off now. I feel like I’ve been in a race where i was one of the first to start and might still be the last to finish.
If anyone is still following this build thread any encouragement will be welcome. I don’t know how to change the title which has become very misleading due the change in focus over time.