Hi all! I recently bought & built my first Maslow machine hoping to build some custom furniture to sell asap. I’m not new to woodworking, but since I’m pretty short on cash now I didn’t have money to put into a Ridgid router. Also since I’m into 3D printing I’m aware of better ways to turn rotational motion into linear motion than the way it’s been done with the Ridgid routers.
I was waiting to buy a linear sled kit from a company in China, but had a chance encounter with this little object at my local Harbor Freight & decided to make a go at it.
I’ve spent a few hours disassembling, and cutting things up to use only the top and middle sections to create the linear motion I need. I’ll be strapping a Porter Cable router I already had to it.
A few issues I can think of with this thing which will make it a little challenging.
Friction. I plan to sand everything as smooth as possible and get it tuned as much as possible to keep things less wobbly but still not so tight it can’t be moved. I have been able to get the motor mounted already and have it moving the sled but without any tightening yet.
Weight. I haven’t dropped this in a scale yet, but I estimate it’s about 5 pounds of steel. I know this will change the center of gravity a lot & I’ll have to move the ring out quite a bit to compensate for this. I also expect it will change chain sag & basically force me to re-calibrate completely.
Any thoughts on this? I wouldn’t be surprised to hear others have tried things like this. I really seriously contemplated taking some linear bearings off one of my 3D printers but that thing cost me about $3,000. They and a piece of aluminum would be a lot lighter, but this is what I’m working with for now.
it should work, you can probably reduce the brick weight a bit by having this on
there. the calibration process will handle the chain sag issue (as much as it
can be handled )
cbeam is what many people use. It’s pretty cheap. Actually cheaper to buy it one at a time then in bulk since 25% tarriffs kicked in on any thing over $700 in value.
It’s been a while but I figured I should let the community know how this one turned out.
I took the this thing apart, and had to do some cutting & grinding to get the router to lay nicely on it but it worked out ok. I was able to get the motor mounts for the Z Axis mounted at the top of the screw & with a little grinding on the screw head it even fit in the coupler!
It took me a while to calibrate the Z depth, but after a dozen attempts I got it pretty close!
The only problem I’ve had is the slide tightness screws moving on me. Some locktite would fix that. I just didn’t do it when I put the thing together in case I needed to adjust the screws, but now I have a good feel for how tight they should be after having to adjust them a few times.
Oh, I also reduced the counterbalance to one brick centered at the bottom. Two bricks were just too much weight with the steel of the cross slide.
Overall I kinda did a hack job & it’s not pretty but I got the thing to work.
)