Snail Maslow Assembly

I would absolutely love to have G54 and company work offsets. As an operator, that kinda stuff is really useful. You could actually nest parts on the fly in Ground Control with that to adapt to your scrap stock if you programmed it right.

That kind of fixturing is what makes CNC such a powerful tool. I do like to ATC carousel, though. The 3 axis I use all the time at work has 20 pockets, and that’s good enough for most of what I do. I’m always changing out drills between programs, though. It’d be nice to have a crib of all my frequently used sizes (like a number 7) that was already touched off. Maybe some day I’ll convince my boss we should buy that many drill chucks. xD

Those are good machines, the first mill I ran was one of those. If I were to go down that route, I’d probably look to get a 220v spindle and VFD it. That would give me real good speed control, as well.

Yeah, definitely looking to get the 1100MX with a fourth axis. I think I would rather spend the ATC money on more tapers to do the serialized tooling like my last job. Still have the power drawbar though.

Yeah, it took some of the fun out of doing a setup, but it sure makes it a lot faster. Especially when you’re changing a fair amount of tools.

I got all my parts in for my Z axis so I plan to attempt assembling it tomorrow before work. If all else fails I have Sunday-Tuesday off so I aim to have a working Maslow and a plywood Maslow symbol before I start work next week.

@blurfl I will find out about the calibration frustrations soon if all goes as planned. If the explosives have to come out I’ll post the video :rofl:

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So, I never considered this before but my spindle is a 10k RPM max where the Ridgid is a 10K rpm minimum…is my spindle unrealistic? I have absolutely no experience trying to use a router, I’ve machined a fair amount of steel and aluminum but never wood.

the maslow moves so slowly that a slower spindle is better.

David Lang

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Awesome! I thought so but I’ve never seen a SFM chart for wood. Thank you @dlang!

Well, I have decided to attempt laying out the hole locations with the measuring tools I have directly on the wood and see how that goes. I’m not SUPER confident that I will get everything square and in the right position but I tried to get a 1:1 print out of FreeCAD for a while and I couldn’t figure it out. I will post the file here in case someone knows how to do it and can turn it into a 1:1 PDF. Thanks for following.

Upright.stl (56.9 KB)

I find myself in the same boat; glad to see a fellow “second batcher” making the plunge! I got as far as laser cutting a sled for the R22002 and wood triangulation kit, so I definitely feel your frustration on sled preparation and life interventions:

With those sentiments in mind, I converted your FreeCAD drawing to these PDF templates in the hopes that you keep your momentum going forward. Good luck with your build!

Snail Sled Letter.pdf (1.6 KB)
Snail Sled A4.pdf (1.7 KB)

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THANK YOU! I hope it didn’t take too much and I was just over complicating it. I printed the template off and I will get the wood cut and drilled and Friday at the latest. It looks like my measurements were about 1/8" off for the lengths of the rails and lead screw, but I can adjust that easily enough in assembly. Next up will be drawing the piece that moves on the rails and carries the spindle.

That laser cut sled looks sweet! At times I wonder if I should have just gotten the R22002 (probably) but then I just focus on trying to get the job done with what I have. I’m pretty sure that a drill template for the spindle carriage will be the last thing that isn’t measured during assembly. I plan to use an 1/8" bit to drill a hole in the sled, and then secure the uprights to the sled with a bit in the spindle keeping everything aligned with that hole. Then once everything is secured to the sled I will retract the Z and use a hole saw to clear out the hole around the bit.

Thank you guys for keeping an eye on my build and words of encouragement! It helps keep me motivated and taking pictures to share.

Well, I got the motion components attached to the upright, It isn’t perfect, but the rails are parallel within .025" and the spacing is consistent even though the screw is slightly off center. Tomorrow I will measure where the holes are and get that all recorded. I think I’m going to tray converting everything to mm and burning the lines on with my laser engraver because it will be fun and a cool video to share. Enough of my talk, PICTURE!

EDIT: I measured everything and there is less than .050" of error in any of the measurements and they’re 200mm rails

@Weps thank you again for converting those to PDF for me! That definitely saved me a lot of time!

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You’re welcome! It was just difficult enough to make me feel like I’m still a real aerospace engineer and not a PowerPoint monkey :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

Glad to see you making progress. 50 thou is pretty good with hand tools. And as I think dlang or meticulous mentioned earlier(?), it only has to work well enough to get the machine running to cut a new sled+mount.

Hahahah, no time as an officer in the military huh? I didn’t even think of trying something like PowerPoint. Now I’m fighting my laser engraver I haven’t used in a long time to get it to print the hole locations on the spindle carriage. I have modeled the spindle carriage and I will use this as another example of why I need to buy a 3D printer when I talk to my wife :smile:

My goal is definitely to get the Maslow going today on my day off. My next two days off I have to fly to Honolulu to get my 130lb dog transferred from one flight to another. Living on an island is an interesting change of pace for sure.

I got the pattern printed on the wood, now to drill some holes.


UPDATE: You may notice that the holes are drawn too close together. I had some wishful thinking this would work out…it didn’t hahahah Working on correcting everything now.

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Well, I had to remake the whole shebang, but I got it done and together and everything moves smoothly…except I don’t have the 3mm bolts with nuts I will need to attach my lead screw to my spindle carriage. I will pick them up tomorrow after work. Then I will just need the supports behind the upright and I should be ready to assemble the sled. Whew! This is taking me far longer than I would really like but it is moving along so I can’t complain too much. PICTURES!

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Well, I got the lead screw attached. I had to modify the angle iron bracket a little bit and I’ve realized I should have attached it to the lead screw and then the carriage rather than the other way around. Either way, it all works and the spindle goes top to bottom without too much effort. I have no doubts the servo can move it, even with the 3:1 belt drive I’m going to be using. I was going to post another picture but it doesn’t really look any different than the last picture at this point. I’m concerned that the spindle won’t be square, but I’m confident it will be close enough that I can use it to make an improved version, like a real Meticulous Z. My schedule is thrown off tomorrow so I’m not sure I will get anything done, but I think the next step is for me to cut the supports for the upright, which will have the servo, spindle PSU and rotary spindle speed adjustment.

This is my spindle PSU, the red/yellow/black wires go to the rotary knob to manually control the spindle speed. Can this easily be wired up to Maslow for control of my spindle speed? I also need to figure out how to display my spindle speed if I’m sticking with the rotary knob. The spindle claimed to be a 10K rpm motor. Also, I’m assuming that I could make a spindle power switch by replacing the orange wire, correct? Thanks for sharing your knowledge, and sharing my build with me.

Ah, who am I kidding, pictures or it didn’t happen!

Here is the bracket I made with a 4" cutting wheel and a 3/8" drill bit out of 1’“X1” angle iron. Just something sturdy and cheap I could also use to secure the upright to the sled and keep everything square.

Here is the spindle carriage at max Z, should be about 3" of movement but I haven’t measure what I actually ended up with. I still need to do a dust collection plan, I haven’t really thought about it much, but I think I can do something below the lead screw and between the rails. That’s 3.725" between the screw centers. My dream system is to have the sled with a pocket on the underside and then a hole to plug my vacuum into behind the upright. No idea how that might work at this point, but it is my dream system.

Here is the spindle all the way at the bottom of the travel. I attempted to design this so that I would have about 1/8" of clearance from the spindle nose to the piece being with the spindle all the way down.

Looks like I got it pretty darn spot on! I was actually surprised to see that I was as close to my aimed measurement as I got. You can also the washers that I added to give myself clearance so that I didn’t have to notch the spindle carriage.

You can tell that the view is slightly “lower” than the spindle nose, so it makes the clearance look a little larger than it is perhaps.

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you would want the relay to be on the on/off terminals and keep the pot on the
speed terminals.

you see people talk about wanting to have as fast a RPM as possible, that’s only
true when you are using really small bits.

with the maslow, our feed rate is so slow that you want to have a slow, but
strong spindle (which a BLDC spindle does well) so that your chipload is
reasonable.

the link we had in the wiki for feeds and speeds was bad, I put this new one in
(we really need to have a page with multiple good links so that when one goes
bad we still have others)

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Thanks for the response! Does the Maslow have the ability to adjust spindle speed, or am I stuck using the pot? Using the pot sounds kind of fun because I can figure out where the knob gives certain RPM and then burn a backplate to give me an idea within a reasonable degree of error. Thank you for the link! That is something I was definitely going to be looking for!

the maslow firmware cannot adjust the spindle speed

David Lang

Ok, I thought I had read that, thank you for the clarification!