Building a Lowrider CNC from start(ish) to finish

so what you see in front of you is my old cnc machine which i was using about five years ago i've since sold it moved on to a few other projects a few little montage here maybe a few arcade machines okay probably more than a few arcade machines but here we are to today so fast forward to today i wanted a bigger cnc machine something i could use to cut naturally bigger stuff as well as even doing little stuff as we as we go along so i found this site quite a while ago and uh really like the low rider and especially like the design by a michael cunningham and he wanted a really nice little system that was portable easily expandable and folds away when not in use because like i say i go through many projects so i wanted something that nothing should be overly heavy should be fairly easy to assemble and fairly straightforward it should try an auto square which was really nice it means it's when you put it back together no matter what you do it's square and it's expandable and uh yeah doesn't take up much space when i'm not using it and here you can see his design and i decided to start the works into fusion 360. so here we are i just open it up and uh i'm not going to detail every step but just kind of walk through you know putting this thing together so those are the end brackets uh made with three quarter inch plywood laminated with holes cut through the middle and then the end basically the roller sections or the the part where the wheels ride along and it was kind of a box beam with a small shelf and then internally i started framing together the removable bed and i wanted it in two pieces again just to make everything easy to fold down and put away when i wasn't using it the final design didn't really look like this i shifted a bit so i could get better use of the bed just depending on where the spindle laid up and we'll show a quick shot underneath here just to show how everything kind of sits together the real kind of i don't want to call it the magic but the real thing on these was they had these he came up with these great uh panel clips and i'll zoom in on one of these right now and what that does is it's a really low profile clip that sits together and you know doesn't take up much lateral space but it gives a really nice positive lock between the frame and the bed so once you get a bunch of those set in your bed can just drop right in i mean there's always a little bit of wiggling but you can drop right in and you got a nice solid work surface to go with all right before we head to the garage just a small intermission just to explain what i'm doing next i wanted to show the whole thing going together kind of in real time just so you could really get a sense of how long individual pieces take to assemble so on to that all right so this is the part where i chronicle how i put this whole thing together basically this is one of the end pieces i'm not going to go through all the steps on cutting and whatnot i'm sure everybody's seeing how to cut wood on a table saw so i guess standby so i've put marks on the end piece as well as the saw horse just so i can get them lined up a little quicker and it's basically just to make sure everything's kind of evenly balanced a couple standard u-bolts just to hold everything down i found just finger tightenings good enough do all right the next step is the self leveling because as the table got bigger i found that the bed sagged quite a bit and again it's a standard soft cut lumber two by threes actually and then i put some threaded inserts with a quarter 20 volts and that's basically kind of like a bed leveling that you'd see on a uh a 3d printer and then i numbered each one so that when i've put it all back together i can put it in a little quicker now the next piece so it's basically a basically a box beam and you can see it's just a three-quarter inch plywood doubled up on either end with some center braces just to keep everything nice and stiff i originally had just a plain flat rail but what i was finding is when you got into some heavier wood it would torque a little bit so i found and not my idea i just went online and somebody else came up with it was that if you basically cut a v groove in it it keeps the wheels in line and then you don't get the same twisting action these guys are kind of like the magic in the sauce they're nice stiff brackets that will hold up the bed and they also help to kind of self-square everything so there's two of those for each panel and this just slots in and before i get too far you can also see that's the belt attachments um this again this all this stuff is somebody else came up with it and i just kind of modified it a little bit for my situation and then some kind of homebrew 3d printed endstops just so i had a basically a positive stop at the y end on both sides so that i can do dual end stops so i had to backtrack a little bit i forgot the gantry will not go on with everything installed so you have to take the panels out move this in a few inches and then put the gantry on so move this out of the way so so all right now to reattach the belts so before i install the gantry this gives you a little kind of a close-up on the self-leveling well i guess there's no self to it it's me leveling so i basically wanted it kind of the midpoint so where it kind of has a tendency to say naturally i can pull the threads up and that will help take the bow out of the wood and then in theory give us a nice flat working surface all the way across and now for the most embarrassing part of this whole build was my wiring it was all together and then i pulled it all apart so that i could make this basically it's an independent control pendant so i can kind of take that with me and it basically just lives right here on the end and then as i fire it up it's using a marlin interface and all of this stuff every single bit of it you can get on the v1 engineering website and fantastic resource for people who want to just build something their cell themselves and great support so i will bring this over so i'll touch so right now it's a dual z homing so one side will pop up then the other all right and then we'll do a xy home so now we're x 0 y 0 and z 1 17 z is just a number it depends which tool bit basically once i get a piece in there i bring the tool bit down zero everything out and then start cutting so now i'll take a little bit more close up on the gantry ends themselves alright so this is the business end so we've got the pin spindle power supply this is a standard 500 watt really noisy spindle i think from aliexpress maybe is where i got it i did have this whole thing running with uh gerbil gerbil however you say that and i found it was just too noisy it was always throwing errors i was always getting end stop problems because it was just loud but with the marlin it doesn't seem to have that issue so i'm thankful for that i've got emergency stop that basically just basically functions as my power button spindle control down over here that controls the speed to be honest i haven't ever cranked it less than maximum speed because this 500 watt spindle isn't all that uh robust and then the 24 volt power supply 24 volt is right back in here and behind so get a close up on the end stops it's just a homemade 3d print bracket and then the bracket themselves i'll detail how i made those again it's all all the templates and everything are on v1 website so i didn't reinvent the wheel here and i made a custom bracket to mount the cable chain holder just to keep everything stiff and then a few pieces of tape along the way just to tie everything down the wheels are standard 76 millimeter wheels i couldn't actually find any 60 millimeter wheels which is what they call for on the site um i had tons of roller blades laying around you can get those at any kind of the dollar store or i guess not dollar store value village kind of thing so i had to make some adjustments on the back side of the wheel put a little brass shim in there just to kind of keep everything stiff and this is kind of the uh the cleaner other end plate standard nema 17 motors more than adequate i've never cut aluminum everybody wants that can you cut aluminum i don't know i've only ever cut wood and then wiring management again is not my not my specialty you

Channel: Too Many Hobbies

Views: 14,808

Keywords: Lowrider2, lowrider, CNC, diy cnc, v1engineering

Id: oSTO3ugrU6Y

Length: 16min 59sec (1019 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 21 2022