It’s not that I haven’t been working on stuff, it just hasn’t been car related. The thought process has gone something like this:
– I set out a while back to make a wood gear clock
– Cutting the parts by hand resulted in poor part accuracy and finish, and my laser printer isn’t producing accurate paper patterns.
– Never having seen what a CNC router produces, it was surprising to see how poor the results were
– Laser cutter services were considered, but at ~$700, thoughts turned to building a laser cutter
– Realized that if building a laser cutter (or most anything else for that matter), a 3D printer could be useful for various brackets
– That turned into thinking that maybe a 3D printer should be first on the list
– Saw a YouTube video of someone building a 3D-printed clock
– Started thinking about creating 3D-generated clocks instead of wood, possibly eliminating the need for a laser cutter altogether.
– Started looking at various 3D printers
– Considered Creality and Prusa
– For building a clock with a 3D printer, a decent bed size (~300mm) would be nice for large gears, which rules out Prusa
– Looking at Creality, the Ender 5 Plus is certainly large enough, though I have little need for the height
– The Ender 5 Plus reminds me a bit of a Honda owner who replaces every part of the drivetrain, then claims how awesome his “Honda” is. I’m only partly kidding, because users are saying that after they replaced the Bowden tube, extruder, hot end, added a silent controller bd, and maybe upgrade the display, and power supply, it’s really good.
– This led to, “well, if all those parts have to be replaced in a brand new unit to make it really good, maybe I should build my own from scratch.”
So that’s what I’ve been doing for the last month or so. Instead of starting from zero though, it made sense to at least start with an existing frame kit, and went with this design.
There is a lot more to the above printer build and you can find it over on the Midlana Builders Off Topic forum
I was thinking about driving Midlana to a new destination for some photo ops, but with it being 111 degrees F out there, that was put off.
