วีดีโอ

Actually Yes, I just haven't gotten around to making up a new video. I ended up replacing the unistrut with 20x40 V-Slot rail, and then designed some V-Slot carriages which bolted to where the skate wheels were previously. I printed these in ABS for ultimate strength. I used the machine quite extensively around last Christmas (2011) and it's been sitting in the vertical position since. So far so good. If you want the design for the V-Slot carriages, I'll be happy to post them up on Thingiverse.

Actually Yes! I took some time away from machining to get some fairly major projects around the house done, but I've just started back at it recently. I have removed and replaced the channel strut with v-slot rail and designed some v-wheel trolleys that the gantry now rides on. I haven't yet folded it up vertically as I don't yet have anything to lock the gantry down to the v-slot, but it's a relatively easy design so that should be forthcoming shortly. I will definitely post a video update once I've got it folding up again.

It's called Unistrut. It's in the electrical section of most big box home stores like home Depot or Lowes. I've since removed those from my table and replaced it with V-Slot which my gantry now rides on.

@@larrywimble2131 like aluminum extrusion v-slot? If so those wheels wear down so fast on my one 3d printer, can't imagine it on a CNC router.

@@Dougie085 yes that's that stuff. We'll see what happens. I tried the cheap linear rails and had no real success getting them to glide. The V-Slot rails glide nicely. I'm still learning all of this. We'll see what happens in practice.

@@larrywimble2131 Was there something wrong with the Unistrut? Or are you just trying to improve it overall?

@@Dougie085 nothing wrong with the Unistrut itself, but the skate wheels wandered. So I went with guides for a long time. The guides worked, but I wanted to fold my table vertically for storage, and I had devised a method to lock the skate wheels down, and it worked great up until one of the locks broke and nearly destroyed my gantry. So.... I decided to put the thing on tracks of some sort and here we are.

That's certainly an interesting idea. The only thing that concerns me is that it might put a fair amount of lateral stress on the XZ main assemblies. It's one thing for the XZ mains to bear the weight of the Z-axes. It might be another thing altogether for it to bear the weight of the entire X axis including the router.

Hey Johnny! I don't produce a lot of content, especially right now. Haven't had a lot of shop time recently due to "other projects" around the house. Should be back messing with the CNC machine in the next few weeks.

Good catch! That unit has since been disassembled, but is waiting reassembly in a smaller form factor, probably as a laser system.

Thanks. I started to beef up the wheel locks which seems like the only solution that won't introduce a twist into the gantry. Unfortunately my professional life is sucking up all of my free time at the moment or I might be done with it already.

Not sure how I cheated; it was intended to work that way (though I did neglect to unlock the wheels which makes it way easier to slide). Looking back at this, I would make the pivot point static if I did it again.

@@larrywimble2131 Thanks for the info! Indeed, a static pivot point makes the whole thing a lot more simple i think. I was just wondering how 'nice' it would slide back to it's pivot point in the video, but that part was not on camera :-)

Nevermind the size question, I saw the "calculator" on the website. I have yet to find the autoleveling/squaring gcode though.

I've thought about it, but there are some things I would want to redo and test before making plans available. The thing is crazy heavy and the cart has some lateral stability issues, though that would only come into play when moving it around in the vertical position. I try to to stress it that way.

@@larrywimble2131 looking at it now, I can see how there would be a stability issue. shouldn't be to difficult to figure out. great solution

@@larrywimble2131 also, check out the caster solution I came up for this: th-cam.com/video/A14jKa-kbzg/w-d-xo.html I think it would work really well for your cart!

@@TheHowtoDad That is super slick! You're making me think about redoing my cart now 😁

@@larrywimble2131 it's awesome! so much faster, easier and more stable when in the "locked" position

It's not with the belts. I 3d printed some holders that bolt to the unistrut that hold the wheels in place. You could put it anywhere along the table. Links to this files are in the video description.

I love it, though I haven't yet utilized the full length of it. I'm planning to do an upright arcade cabinet in the next few months. I'll post up a build video of that.

Thanks! If you look through the other comments, you'll find the links. I'll compile them all this week and update the video description.

I'm not sure that making a video of that is going to be easy or even possible (since I've lost the password to my lowrider's pi), but what I can tell you is that I used a regular Raspbian Lite image, installed X and cncJS on it, and under that, installed cncjs-web-pendant (you can google that, it's on Github). Then I added some startup scripts to automatically launch the browser to the cncjs-web-pendant URL on localhost. There's nothing super-difficult here; it's just requires patience. If I do redo that image at any point, I will video-document it next time.

Sure thing, look through the comments, the link is there. I'll add it to the video on the next few days

The channel is too deep for running the wheels inside of them, not to mention that back of the channel has holes in it for mounting. I do have another video I took right after I finished the machine that shows the auto-level/auto-square functions. It's on my channel I believe.

I don't really have plans for this. Everyone's Lowrider would be different, so it'd be difficult to make plans for this.

I will try to get those uploaded in the next few days.

www.thingiverse.com/lwimble/designs

I used a Creality Ender 3. You can pick them up on Amazon for about $230 USD. That said, you could use most any 3D printer to do the job.

The RAMPS board is a "hat" that you attach directly to the Arduino. The Pi is only connected to that by USB. I am running cncJS on the Pi, and I also added the 7" touchscreen which you can get on Amazon. Then I added the "cncjs-web-pendant" software (found on github) to that so that pendant would display on the touchscreen. Somewhere on this thread is a link to the display mount on Thingiverse which will point you to the items on Amazon.

Oh, and to answer your question about breaking it down....... Some people have made their table fold up to a wall. Others have theirs fold up horizontally (sorta like a Mazlow). I'm actually in the process of making a cart that will allow me to fold the table up vertically and wheel it over to a corner of my garage. I'll post a video of that if it works out.

I did in fact start with that, yes. It wasn't all that difficult. I set it up on my test bench and had it all working within in a couple hours (although I have to say emulating the endstop switches manually in a way that won't throw GRBL into an alarm state is somewhat of a challenge).

@@larrywimble2131 I assume that do you use 4 axis=X2, 5 axis=Z2. And do you used endstop pins as follow X1=Xmin, X2=Xmax, Y=Ymin, Ymax=unused, Z1=Zmin, Z2=Zmax. Is that correct? I have spend a week to figure out and still straggle, alarm alert but i don't know if i have everything wired correctly can do you share more details please. Thank you very much for your answer.

@@kristianpraslicka3669 In config.h, I set N_AXIS to 5. Then I set the individual axes in this order: XYZZX (the long axis on my machine is X, not Y like most others). Then set $3 to 0. This is important. If you have any motors running the wrong way, just flip the connector. Following that, you can set the bits in $23 to reverse direction for any motors that you want to home in a different direction. My limit switches are set to normally closed. I do not know in what order they are connected to the RAMPS board, but it's not hard to figure out just by depressing a switch and seeing which axis limit switch triggered by issuing a '?' command to GRBL.

@@larrywimble2131 Thousands time thank you!!! It worked finally, just it was need to also edit home cycle for 5 axis. I was just overthinking with endstops, masking, cpu_map adjusting and it was so simple, no inverting of endstop needed, just what you wrote. Thank you for your reply again!

@@kristianpraslicka3669 Glad I could help :-)