I'm considering building the printnc. What limitations have you found that have brought about your redesign? Looks great mate 👍
@BryanHoward
2 жыл бұрын
Prepare yourself for me rambling on about this machine. I’ve been meaning to do a write up on it anyways so here goes. I’ve built it, modified many parts of it and know just about everything there is to it. The PrintNC is a well balanced machine. It’ll cut through soft stuff like wood and plastic like it wasn’t even there. It cuts aluminum quite well (aluminum is just shiny wood after all). It’ll cut through steel, iron, and even stainless steel with the correct speeds and feeds, the finish won’t be as good as a VMC but it’ll do the job and won’t cost you $100K for entry. What it’s capable of cutting is not so important because it has a 2.2kw water cooled spindle and a water cooled spindle is far superior to any router you can find in home depot in every way. You can pretty much cut anything that can be cut. A single flute carbide end mill spinning at up to 24k on a 2.2kw spindle will go through anything. What the frame of a CNC is made out of will have the most impact on its capability. This machine is made out of rectangular structural steel making the entire frame much more rigid than any machine made out of aluminum extrusions like the popular 80x20 extrusions. Steel comparatively to aluminum extrusions is also very cheap. The standard PrintNC uses 3” x 2” steel but many others including myself have made machines with other sizes of steel for rigidity or changing the work volume. All the linear movements are done with square linear guide rails that are stiffer and more rigid than the round ones and though the machine by default uses only a single bearing block carriage per rail, it is still very rigid. Motion from the stepper motors is applied through a ball screw which is very precise, smoother with very little backlash vs using a lead screw or rack and pinion alternatives. There is not much to say about the electrical, depending on if you want to use a parallel port style breakout board, a Mesa board like the Mesa 7i76e or grblhal like the grblHAL2000 which I think is the best way to go now. Software side most people are either using LinuxCNC like myself or the grblhal ecosystem. All this stuff is open source and in the case of LinuxCNC has been around for a long time and is common in use in industry. For people starting from the beginning I still think grblhal is the future of CNC controllers and I’ll probably look at switching over to that in the future. Lastly and by far the most important is the community around the PrintNC. It is large, people are friendly, very knowledgeable, all skill levels. There is a very detailed wiki with everything documented and steps to build a machine. The fusion 360 design of the machine is parametric so you can change the dimensions for a machine for a specific purpose e.g. you want a machine to be able to cut standard 4’ x 8’ material. Or you live in an apartment and want a tiny desktop size machine (look up the PrintNC mini). The guy at the center of the PrintNC project has also setup connections to an AliExpress store that sells a kit with reputable quality parts at a price you’ll have a hard time matching by buying your parts yourself. Many people try sourcing parts themselves and most of them regret not getting the kit due to the work involved and ending up with mismatched parts or just ends up costing them more. PrintNC is just a bunch of parts you source and put together yourself, there have been a tremendous amount of man hours over an entire community of people that has evolved it to where it is now. This not only includes the machine self but everything else like the software, and electrical side of things. It gives you the best bang for your buck. It takes a lot of time to build but by the end of it, you’ll know everything inside and out on how to build and operate a more professional level cnc machine that would otherwise be cost prohibitive for most people for a comparative brand name cnc machine. I would suggest looking at their discord because that is where the printnc community is most active discord.com/invite/RxzPna6
@toddspeck9415
2 жыл бұрын
@@BryanHoward This overview of the PrintNC explained many things I was curious about. Thank you so much for writing this up. Really enjoy watching your videos, seeing your machine, and all the modifications your doing. Excellent craftmanship. Thanks Bryan.
@ShittySwag
Жыл бұрын
@@BryanHoward great writeup, you've sold me on the machine (was 50/50 vs a milo v1.5). I'm wondering if you've considered something like filling the table extrusions/steel with epoxy granite or rubber concrete by any chance? I presume there's a reason why it isn't a common mod people do & I understand why you wouldn't do it on the other extrusions (wire routing) but the bed seems like a prime part of the machine that could benefit from something that's fairly simple like that
@SQLException
10 ай бұрын
Sorry I need to bug you here in the comments. Cant find the Info I need anywhere (no, not using Discord): Does going from single to dual carriage limit the work area? My WIP build is about 33 x 33", and I really need this area (I started to build this for a specific purpose - it's way too late now to add 1 or 2 inches in build size). I'm about 40% done with my PNC and about to start to work on the Y-Axis. The standard Y-Rollers are 70 mm long, the dual is 150 mm according to the official Metric Fram Size Calculator. When I switch from the single to dual carriages in the calculator, nothing else changes. It still outputs the same Beams/Tubes I need in lenght, same hardware etc... So before I proceed any further: is this legit? Will I NOT lose any work area with the dual carriage build? If so... Why not lol? It should. Another question would be: where to mount the X-Gantry-Beam (100 x 50 mm for me) on the 150 mm long Y-Roller exactly? Would you suggest me to center the X-Beam on the Roller like "Christian Lehner" did with his PNC? Yours is kinda lean back (probably to make up for the spindle that has some stick out in the Y- direction).
@BryanHoward
10 ай бұрын
Yes, running dual carriages will limit the travel on the rails and your overall work area. I never used any of the build calculators for the printnc so don’t have much say in them. Moving the gantry beam back allows me to use more of the work area if I put longer Y rails on my machine in the future. My changes from single carriages to dual are a very different design to what most of the people on the printnc discord are doing but if you would like to look at them closer you can download the source files on my github repo github.com/bhowiebkr/PrintNC_Pro_Solidworks
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