Like everyone else, I don’t have enough shop space for a big table… But I’d like to cut bigger stuff.
It seems like it would be fairly easy to mount the mpCNC to a “table” on a wall.
That would put a lot of weight on the Z axis legs (Now the Y axis legs), so they’d have to be kept super short… but if I’m only cutting ply anyway, I don’t need those super long.
I’m wondering if the NEMA17s will have enough oomph to bring the Y axis (Now the Z axis) up against the weight of the spindle/router?
Oh, and as a general question, why don’t y’all use larger pulleys for your belts? More teeth = less slipping, and we have microstepping, so it’s not like the loss in resolution is really a problem?
I am planning a build… I’ve been building CNC machines for a while and am rather excited about the mpCNC’s flexibility in sizing.
No one has tried it yet, it has enough power all by itself but I have never tried cutting something that way. But you will have to keep the angle less than 90 as the Z is using gravity to keep backlash to a minumim.
Bigger pulley less power, more speed. Exact opposite of what we need. Your stepper will stop before you will actually slip a tooth though.
If you skip a tooth your belts are not tight enough, but the stepper skipping a step looks and sounds exactly the same. Without marking them you wouldn’t know. Either way a skipped step or skipped tooth means something else was really wrong, the forces down at the bit tip are plenty high. Right now by default the kits I sell have the steppers set to just about high enough to skip steps before breaking a bit (usually). You can turn them up but to me I would rather not break a bit.
what would happen when you were done the cutting and shut the power off to the steppers and they were high up on the table. wouldn’t everything just come crashing down fast and hard to the bottom of the table? What would hold the steppers up? I guess you could have it home in a bottom corner, but what if you lost power? I just see everything crashing downwards.
I’m digging through the archives here and found this and I can’t help but wonder what became of this. I would also be tempted to save space in my tiny one-car garage by doing all sorts of gimmickery llike vertical tables, fold away tables, etc.
