Sorry, this may be wrong part of the forum, its just a suggestion while you guys are in the alpha stages of the design.
First off, big fan, love the designs, and thankyou for releasing the designs in different sizes. You’ve saved folks a lot of frustration in dealing with region specific components. Big Kudos!
I’ve decided to start on a smallish indoors MPCNC build as it will serve a different purpose for me, namely detailed work and harder materials. However I’m also about to build some cupboards inside my house, and being able to rout them from full sheet of ply would be a major thing. That said, like a lot of people, a machine of this size will take up room I don’t have spare, so even as the designs are being released I’m trying to figure out how I would make the machine store away.
What could be a big value adder to the design might be to incorporate some convenience elements. Possibly (heavy duty) folding legs, a few wheels on one side to allow it to be pushed around, and maybe a parked position that covers and protects the router and has a pin to lock it in place while stored/being moved about and setup. Auto bed calibration with a touch sensor might also be another useful add on to account for small movements in the bed.
I’m committing the sin of adding features before the product itself is finalised but often giving some consideration for factors like this in early stages can make it a lot easier when time comes to implement them later.
I think convenience features like that may be a big plus for the lowrider as the design is going to achieve a much more affordable entry point for large scale routing jobs by using a lighter gantry design and trading off some of the fine control over the z axis. Additional convenience and storage would likely appeal to its target demographic. Folks who needs super fine detail for massive sheets will be willing to pay large amounts and give up a lot of room for huge machines. But for more regular consumers like myself, I just want neat straight cuts for my woodworking projects and don’t want to permanently lose a parking spot to achieve it.
Anyways, just a thought, thanks heaps again for your designs, great work.
I am working through thoughts for my own Low Rider, and I am dwelling on having the gantry stored on it’s own, and then 3x pieces that would have some registration dowels, or bolts to combine them. Each piece would be the full 5’ish wide, and about 3 feet long. I could then bolt them together, and put the whole thing on some saw horses, maybe with some splines, too. I would probably keep one of the boards with the CNC on it all the time, and just extend it with the two other pieces (or just one more piece) depending on what I was cutting. It looks like there are some end pieces that always have to be at the end, so there might be a part for that too, that I’d have to bolt on. You probably wouldn’t need an entire sheet to do cabinets, if you were willing to waste some material by roughing out the pieces first. Storing some rigid table tops wouldn’t be that hard, I could hang them up high, or store them on their side…
That’s just my $0.02, I haven’t built it yet, so I’m not sure what that’s worth. I hope to get one box built by next Friday, just to be able to handle the parts coming in from Ryan’s testing.
Thanks for all the compliments. We are on the same page on everything you said.
Table storage should be relatively easy. Right now my table (work surface) is sitting on top of my two small normal work tables. When not using the LowRider I plan on just leaning the big table top against the wall and putting my two little tables against it. The table can be anything, Dimensions coming soon, what seems to be the important part is the 4" thickness as this adds to the suitability of the gantry. The more I use it though I am not sure how important this is. So the table design is all on you, folding legs would be very easy.
Auto level is not really needed, I’m actually never a fan of this anyway. Because it is on those wheels as long as the table is pretty flat across the short distance the long direction could be significantly bowed and not really matter. It starts in a negative z direction, I move it up with the screen and then let it cut. accuracy is totally dependent on the table. So if you know you are only going to be doing through all cuts, your table could be jacked up and not matter one bit. I am cutting on top of a 1/2 sheet of foam, perfect.
As for storage of the actual machine…It is not terribly complicated but it isn’t a 5 minute job either. I would say the easiest way is going to be just taking of the long x rails and unplugging the steppers and cutting a zip tie on the belt. then you will have the 2 sides, carriage, and rails. Then I unscrew the belt holders for the y axis as I don;t want to break then moving the table around. Lots of room for improvement on this front but it is doable.