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The rise of Thienos

A project log for MultiBot CNC v2

A low cost 3D printed CNC that can be built with minimal tools yet is capable of great things.

david-tuckerDavid Tucker 12/31/2020 at 01:300 Comments

I have wanted to make a wooden lid for Dusty from the beginning but I lacked the skills to fabricate it.  Now that I have a bandsaw that can cut circles I decided to make one out of two layers of 1/4" plywood glued together.  

This is working great, it no longer warps under a vacuum and it is trivial to remove (maybe too easy in fact).  The only issue in making this is that I used a jig saw to make the inner holes.  The problem is my normal blade would not turn tight enough to make the cut, while my thin blade warped all over the place.  In hindsight I should have broken down and got a circle cutter.

I did have to extend the threads so they could fit through the thicker top. I have updated my models on thingiverse to match.

I went ahead and tried making a Thien baffle for this while I was at it.  My first attempt turned out to be a bit of a dud.  When I did back to back tests with and without the baffle the baffle made things worse. The big problem appears to be that the baffle was to close to my lid, allowing the dust to get trapped under the inlet nozzle.  That in turn keeps the dust circulating at the top and eventually getting sucked back out the outlet.

I did not get a great shot of this all together but you can see it from the side in the shot below.  These are not perfect shots but in the one above there is no new dust in the shop-vac, the inlet is blocking you from seeing that.  in the second there is quite a bit of dust and when I took the lid off Dusty a lot of dirt came out of the top.

I'm printing new standoffs that will extend the baffle down to see if I can make it work better.  I will make a new post once I have a chance to test it.  I also had an idea for making a diffuser on the outlet to try and broaden the return air path without using a baffle.  I'm printing it out now and will let you know how it compares.

Anyway overall this worked great.  I would probably use a higher quality and thinner board for the lid next time, this is really course stuff, but it is all I had laying around.  Also I have a vague idea of using the bucket handle as a latch to hold the lid on.  If I added small tabs to the lid that the handle would lock into I think it would hold together well even if this all tipped over.

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