Originally shared by Brandon Satterfield I am sure this has been thought of, conceived,

Originally shared by Brandon Satterfield

I am sure this has been thought of, conceived, tried; but I am gluten for punishment.
I want to build an “all in one”.

A gantry I have recently built is pretty large. Dual Y motors, single X, Z controlled at the head. So pretty much run of the mill (pun intended) cnc mill, plasma cutter, laser cutter.

I want to be able to put all these things plus an extruder and a blast head on it. Yep love a challenge.

So talk me out of this, off this cliff. Challenges I am aware of.
Stepper motors: I need to go with something with umph. I believe the heaviest load would be the mill head, I don’t want to use a dremel. I want to place a Dewalt motor (heavy) on it.
Deflection: I currently have open builds 20x40 running across the X. I had to use 80/20s second moment of inertia on their 20x40 to calculate, open builds does not have this information, but should be similar. This would suffice for all things but the mill head.
And the creme de la creme of challenges all in one software: so I can finagle a marlin/repetier/slic3r-cura to do almost all things… Additive and removal, but not without major firmware changes every head change. I can play with a grbl/Chilipepper for all things but the plastic extrusion, I think.

Tell me other design challenges, why not to take this design on.
This would be for my own amusement, not looking for speed, but accuracy and precision.

I think the word you were reaching for there was “glutton” unless you really are a protein for punishment ;-), but that aside for accuracy you’ll want feed back on the axes in the form of glass slides. That and servo motors rather than steppers. You are probably not going to be able to use an Arduino but you can use a small linux machine for the CNC controller.

Do you want to be able to swap heads while retaining registration? So are you going to say 3D print something, then swap in a laser head and engrave it? That will require that you can change heads without disturbing the machines setup. So rigidity is going to be very important and the ability to return to the same spot (repeatability).

Regarding needing firmware changes when switching heads:
Can’t most firmware settings be changed with gcode? Perhaps jsut appropriate gcode headers for each tool to switch to the appropriate settings?

Firmware settings can be changed in g code in Marlin if you have EEPROM turned on. That is a build-time setting though. you will need to recompile if it wasn’t enabled last time the firmware was installed.

There are a lot of Dewalt routers, telling us it’s a Dewalt (heavy) (?!) motor tells us nothing.

The setup here might move a palm router. The problem is CNC routing demands different machine structure properties than 3D printing, slow & beefy vs. Fast and light. So you’re going to compromise somewhere. Also, 3D printing demands an absolutely level bed, and routering on the bed will probably knock the bed out of level if it’s not extremely rigid. 2040 might not be enough.

@Chuck_McManis I am a protein… Several. And lipids, carbs, and fat. Haha. I will look further into the servo comment. I have found more challenges, I have not found a machine running on servos.

@Carlton_Dodd yes the Gcode could be changed, this is not as difficult of a challenge as I once thought. Thanks.