Original post here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sienci/longmill-benchtop-cnc-router/posts/2521864

More news, more progress…

Wow, one and a half or two weeks goes by so fast.

Stuff in production/ordered

Here are the things that we’ve ordered:

– Motors

– 3D printer filament

– Some of the fasteners

– Lead screws, pulleys, couplers, bearings, collars, acme nuts, and other transmission parts

– Aluminum rails and linear guides

– V-wheels and eccentric nuts

– Arduinos and drag chains

We expect that these items, will be complete or have arrived near the middle and end of June.

The motors however, are estimated to arrive in early July since it takes a few weeks to manufacture.

Here are the things that still need to be ordered:

– Power supplies

– Drivers

– Some of the fasteners

– Gantry plates

We expect to have the remaining electronics parts to be ordered in the next week or two. We were trying to make sure that all of the specs for the electronics are up to par and are as safe and reliable as possible. However, with waiting and testing for samples, things have taken a little longer than expected. For example, making sure that the DC female connectors are able to handle the full current from the power supply, and running the driver for many many (15+) hours to check for drifting and temperature.

Below: Stress testing the drivers for drifting and temperature change.

With this in mind, we expect that parts are estimated to be arriving in mid-July because they are being ordered later in the game. Backers (at this point) should expect shipping to start near the end of July.

A new shield

The beta testers will know that we used a ST25 shield with the Arduino involves a complicated nest of wires. This makes assembly complicated and unreliable.

We’ve created a new shield that will make the wiring easier, along with all the features so people can add more easily:

– Endstops/Limit switches

-Z axis probes

– Spindle control/lasers!

Some small improvements you can expect

Between the beta machines and the newest machine, here are some minor improvements you’ll see.

– Aluminum router mount (discussed in previous updates)

– Better bearing support on the lead screws that can support more forces 

– Some small tweaks to the gantry design to offer a little bit extra travel

– Steel motor plate on the Z axis to improve heat dissipation for super long jobs

– Lock nuts in as many places as possible

Shirts

Thank you to everyone who commented/messaged us letting us know that they are interested in shirts! 

We’ll make sure to make them available soon!

 We were in the newspaper!

Thank you to Greg Dent, one of our beta testers, for inviting a reporter from our local newspaper to interview us! We got nearly a full page in the newspaper yesterday. Read the full article here:  https://www.therecord.com/news-story/9402898-waterloo-startup-develops-affordable-desktop-cnc-machine/ 

This post has been copied over from Kickstarter (
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sienci/longmill-benchtop-cnc-router/posts/2512625 )

T-shirts

T-shirts have been ordered from DNA Screen Printing situated about a block from our office. Shirts should be ready at the end of the month and will be shipped out as soon as they are done. If you haven’t completed your survey yet AND YOU ARE A BACKER WHO ORDERED A SHIRT, please do so.

Also, just out of curiosity, is anyone interested in buying shirts from us? Should we make that available?

New printers in the 3D printing farm

We’ve added a bunch of new printers to our farm! We’re in the progress of testing all of them and setting up them to print parts for the LongMill. We will be making a couple of mods to the printer this coming week to ensure that they provide the best quality prints. 

We’ve ordered new filament to be shipped to us (about 500 rolls of filament), but chances are it will take a few weeks to show up. In the meantime, we’ll be ordering filament from a local supplier to keep the print farm running.

Aluminum rails

Material for the rails have been ordered and should be at the manufacturer at the start of this week. From there it should be a few weeks to have them all cut, drilled, and tapped. 

Gantries

Design for the Z axis gantry has been tested in steel (versus aluminum like in our last test). Seems a bit more solid which is promising. We are making some small changes to the X and Y axis gantries before having them sent out to be made. I am hoping that the small set of test parts will be ready to pick up this coming week. 

One thing that needs to be considered is the coating method for the gantries. Because there is an interface between the aluminum and the Y axis that needs to have fairly high tolerances. Here are some options that we have:

1) Powder coating: this was our initial coating option and the process we’ve used for the Mill Ones. However, it was brought up that the thickness of the coating can vary, and thus creates some uncertainty on how well the aluminum will fit. We can of course, estimate the coating thickness and make the gap slightly wider to accommodate, but of course we want to have the fit to be as close as possible.

2) Black oxide: this is a new process that was recommended by one of our manufacturers. Essentially, it’s the process of adding a black oxide layer to the steel. Most of the bolts used for our machines go through this treatment actually. While this is a good process is good for tolerances since the coating thickness is very very small, the potential downside is that often times a oil or wax coating is added to the material which can leave residues. 

3) Bare steel: all of the beta LongMills do not have any coating on the steel. This of course is the fastest, cheapest, and easiest option, but is probably the less attractive looking. From using our machines, there hasn’t been any rust, but of course the bare steel does…just look like bare steel.

I think that we will try to account for the thickness of the gap in powder coating, since according to our manufacturer has a variation of less than 3 thousandths of an inch, which should be small enough to not make that big of a difference, but it would suck to make around 800 plates to have them not fit properly.

We could potentially do the X and Z axis plates first and powder coat them, and throw in a couple of test Y axis plates into that batch, which may add two to three weeks to our schedule.

Ordering parts from China

Almost all of the parts have gotten ordered from China, there are a few more things to be ordered. We expect everything to show up around mid to late June. Some of the things have been pre-packaged for us in China, making it a little easier to do final assembly.

Final thoughts

We’ve definitely have had to be much more careful in ordering parts and manufacturing especially at the volume we are building, and that has slowed down things a little bit. We of course want to make sure that things are built at the highest quality possible, and done right the first time. Luckily we haven’t hit any major snags besides trying to take things at a quick but careful pace.

I think that I was expecting to have had ordered most parts from China about a week or two ago, but it took a little longer from trying to vet the quality of the parts and get the right quantities ordered. I just wanted to mention this so that people can get an idea on where we are along in the original schedule.

The stuff made in Canada is pretty much on schedule still.

Anyways, happy making!

PS. If you know other people want to get a LongMill that missed out on the Kickstarter, we have a pre-order page on our website available here:  https://sienci.com/product/longmill/ 

Hi everyone, here’s our first progress update.

This post has been cross posted from Kickstarter (
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sienci/longmill-benchtop-cnc-router/posts/2494923 )

T-shirt and T-Shirt and Dust Mask rewards

If you are one of the fifteen backers who backed us at this tier, a survey has been sent to you. Please fill out the survey to help us get your shirt to you.

Payment processing

You should have noticed that your pledges have been processed. There are a very small handful of people who have had issues with your credit card payment. If your payment didn’t go through and you want to stay on the list, please get in touch with us.

Manufacturing updates

We’re going to cover some updates around the manufacturing here on this update. 

Just so everyone knows, we’re still waiting on the Kickstarter funding to come in. We talked with the lending company to spot us some cash between the end of the Kickstarter and when the funding comes in, but it seems that the process took a little longer than expected, the fees for the loan are quite high, and it might be better to wait for the funding to arrive first for some of the larger purchases.

Luckily some of the manufacturers we work with have net 30 days or don’t require us to pay for everything up front so the timing should work out for this.

We’ve also been using the money already in our accounts to start off with some of the smaller purchases, but some of the bigger ticket stuff may need to wait a little bit.

3D printing

As you might have saw, we’ve been 3D printing parts on our two Prusa i3s and at a lesser degree on our two Cetus printers. Due to the volume of all of the printing we need to do, it will be hard to keep up with all the printing. We have ordered 8 new 3D printers to add to our farm to let us produce more parts per day.

Just for the record, the 3D printers that we ordered are the Anycubic Mega-S. One of the reasons we got this printer is because of the Ultrabase print surface, a dimpled glass surface that releases prints right off the surface once they are done with very little or no force. In a print farm scenario, this is really important because from our experience, the most force that a printer experiences in its lifetime comes from removing prints, and by minimizing that, the printers can be more reliable and last longer.

I have been testing and printing on one of the Anycubic Mega printers in the office over the last week or so, since I wanted to order one off Amazon to test quickly before making a bulk purchase, and the print quality and reliability have been good.

I expect the printers to arrive at the middle of next week and we will start putting them together!

Aluminum router mounts

On the last update we were talking about the potential to use aluminum mounts versus plastic printed mounts. We received several samples of the mount last week and have been testing them.

Basically what we did to test was to use a dial indicator to measure deflection at the tooltip by applying a force. The Z height for the gantry was kept the same, and the router was moved to be at the same height for both tests. Pulling 10kg (about 22lbs) from the router collet in the Y direction for both types of mounts resulted in approximately 0.014″ of deflection. Since both mounts have approximately the same deflection, we can conclude that the performance for both mounts are approximately the same.

Here are some other things to consider.

• We tested the aluminum mount on an aluminum plate. Aluminum is slightly less stiff than steel, so performance may be slightly better when the plate is made from steel.
• The height of the router and gantry, and the placement of the mount on the Z axis has an impact on rigidity as well. The aluminum mount may have better performance depending on where the mount is located on the gantry.

Since the performance of both mount are approximately the same (with more potential for the aluminum to be better), we’ll be working on using these mounts over the plastic ones, but we will have the mounting points available to have printed mounts for the non-standard router sizes.

Aluminum rails

We are just finishing up tallying the amount of rails that we need to manufacture and finalizing the design. We’ve reached out to our manufacturer to get the quotes and process finalized as well as the material supplier as well. 

I am also working on finalizing the drag chain mounting points and size which the rails will need.

Gantries

We are planning to pick up a couple samples of the Z axis gantry on Thursday to test with the aluminum router mount, and once that is all looking good, make about 400 of them. As mentioned before, the steel should be more rigid that the aluminum.

We’ve made some small changes to the Z axis that will let us get a bit more Z axis travel which is pretty exciting!

Next step is to have the X and Y axis gantries finalized and sent in for manufacturing as well.

Hey everyone. Thank you for your support and being part of far surpassing our goal. If you are a backer, there are a couple of things you should know and be prepared for. Please read this carefully

T-shirts and dust masks

If you backed us by either choosing the t-shirt or t-shirt and mask option, you should expect to see a survey asking for your size and address within the next couple weeks. Please fill out this survey in a timely manner and we’ll have your stuff shipped out as soon as possible.

LongMill kits

If you backed one of the reward levels for a LongMill kit (any size), you will receive a backer survey through email which will ask for your most up to date delivery address and other details to help us fulfill your order. You should expect this to happen approximately a month and a half before your estimated delivery date. Production schedules will continue to be updated on www.sienci.com/longmill/schedule. Please fill out this survey in a timely manner to ensure we can ship your machines shipped out as soon as possible.

Additional add-ons, such as dust shoes and z axis touch plates will also be uploaded online so that if you want to purchase add-ons and you haven’t through the Kickstarter, you can. We will ship any additional items alongside your machine. Please give us a few weeks for us to put these items up on our website. We will update any new add-ons that are available through Kickstarter updates and through or social media channels.

We’ve been getting a lot of questions from customers on whether or not the LongMill can be mounted vertically, such as on a wall or on the floor, to help save space in a cramped workshop. In this video, we show the LongMill running a job vertically.

There are a few things to know when using your CNC machine at an angle, which you can learn about below.

We want to make sure it is clear that your machine will run the best while sitting horizontally on a table. You will have to make some adjustments to your machine to make it run the best vertically.

Fighting the force of gravity

When the machine is vertical, some of the motors will have to work harder. If you have the machine so that the Y axis is vertical, then your Y axis will have to work harder to move the X axis because it needs to fight the force of gravity. Or if you turn it 90 degrees and have the X axis to be vertical, then your X axis will have to work harder to move the X and Z axis gantries and router.

There are a few things you can do ensure that your machine works reliably in the position you choose:

• You can reduce the max feedrate on the axis that has to fight the force of gravity. Stepper motors have higher torque at lower speeds, so running the machine slower also helps reduce the chance of losing steps.
• Consider using a shallower mounting angle to reduce the load on the motors.
• Increase the current on the drivers for more torque. Please note that increasing the current will cause the motors to heat up much faster, too high current will cause overheating.
• Consider running shorter jobs or allow the machine to cool down between each run.
• Consider using a counterweight, bungee, or spring to assist lifting the axis.

A consideration on wear

Because of the orientation of the machine causes a heavier load to be on some of the delrin anti backlash blocks, this can cause more wear on the part than if otherwise horizontal.

We haven’t had the chance to do long term testing in this configuration, so we won’t be able to give an accurate estimation on it just yet, but these nut blocks are pretty durable and we’ve been using them on our machines for a long time without having to replace them. They are adjusted to account for wear over time.

Replacement blocks are easy to install, and you should expect to pay about $8 to $12 dollars per block (there is one per axis). You can buy them from us and they also sell it online at other retailers (Openbuilds part).

One thing that we do know is that because of the weight of the machine on the block, it actually could contribute to reducing backlash, like on some dual drive 3D printers. We’ll provide updates as we learn more.

Conclusion

Can the LongMill be put vertically for storage? No problem.

Can it cut while vertically? Yes, but there are a few things to know before doing that. But hey, why not try it?

Until next time folks!

The past week has been so busy for us at Sienci Labs. Here’s an update on what we’ve been up to.

MRRF2019

MRRF2019 in Indiana was a blast. I think one of the greatest things about this event is just the fact that there are thousands of dedicated makers and designers pushing to grow the reprap movement. And of course, as machine designers ourselves, it was an awesome opportunity to learn about new designs and technologies, as well as connect with lots of people in the industry.

Also, Tom from Toms3DP made sure to drop by and interview us about the LongMill! Make sure to subscribe to his Youtube channel to watch the interview when it comes out.

Before we left for Canada on Sunday, Josh from i3Detroit invited us over to come check out his makerspace. We brought over the LongMill to make some stuff and we also tried out standing and handstanding on the LongMill’s X axis to demonstrate how tough it is. Dangerous, but we signed a waiver.

Kickstarter and production

Wow, we’re just about a week in, and we are almost 300% funded! Due to the huge response, we have decided to start doing as much manufacturing as we can right now. The first place we will probably start with is the 3D printing. We will do a final once over on the parts, make any final changes and start printing them. The few other things we can do is start to order the parts and electronics in over the next couple weeks.

Webinar next Wednesday

We’ll be hosting another webinar/workshop next Wednesday (April 10, 2019 at 7PM). The topic will be around 2D carving/signmaking.

Some things we will cover include (topics may change):

• V-carving
• 2D design
• Image to carving

Subscribe to us at
https://www.youtube.com/siencilabs to join us on the livestream.

CAMLab

Chris has spent the last couple days working on CAMLab to add some new features. Make sure to keep an eye peeled for updates on it soon!

Hey everyone! Wow, what a first day. Thanks to your support, we hit our goal in just 16 hours!

Help us to keep the momentum going by sharing our campaign with your friends and family. Here are some things you should know/check out:

1) A new video!

Check out this carving of a relief we did on the LongMill! All of the CAM was done on CAMLab and we found the model for free and others at  https://cults3d.com/en/3d-model/art/ram-agorbar. Keep out for a tutorial/webinar in the future on how to make 3D reliefs on your LongMill. 

2) Notable shout-outs and articles

Thank you to

Canadian Woodworking and Home Improvement

Geeky Gadgets

Hackster News

Arduino

For taking the time to write articles about and mention us on their social media.

3) We’re going to be at MRRF2019 this weekend!

If you don’t know MRRF (Midwest RepRap Festival), it’s the largest 3D printer and reprap festival in the world! We’ll be there from Friday to Sunday, so make sure to come say hi if your in the area.

Find more info about it here:  https://sienci.com/2019/03/14/we-are-going-to-mrrf2019/

We were invited to do a workshop in conjunction with the Design Fabrication Zone at Ryerson University on Monday for students and faculty. We’ll be covering the basics of CNC and dabbling with design and CAM.

We currently have about 50 people signed up (capped at 50) but we’re letting more people attend via the interwebs.

We’ll be livestreaming this event on Youtube (follow our channel at https://www.youtube.com/siencilabs) so make sure to follow us there to get notified when the livestream starts.

If you want to follow along in the lesson, make sure to register for a free Onshape Standard account.

Topics covered will include doing basic 3D design, using CAM software like CAMLab, and setting up your machine for a job.

Tune in at around 4:00PM EST (Toronto time) on March 18th. You can save this event to your calendar by clicking on the button below.

Midwest Reprap Festival, the worlds largest festival for Reprap machines and 3D printers, is happening in just a few weeks! Well, we’re happy to announce that we’ll be heading down for the festival!

MRRF2019 happens from March 29 to 31st.

Now you might think, “Well, don’t you guys make CNC machines? Isn’t this for 3D printers?”

Well, you’d be sorta kinda right, but hear me out.

Reprap, or in its full form, describes any replicating-rapid-prototyping machine.

As the Reprap wiki describes, “RepRap is about making self-replicating machines, and making them freely available for the benefit of everyone. We are using 3D printing to do this, but if you have other technologies that can copy themselves and that can be made freely available to all, then this is the place for you too. “

With our aim to create open source machines in a way that is easily manufacturable, and because the Mill One and LongMill are able to replicate its own parts like gantries, beds, and probably with a bit more work, brackets and mounts.

We’re super excited to go down to mingle with all the other reprappers! We’re sure that we’ll have some great chats with other makers, designers, engineers, and all sorts of folk interested in the Reprap movement.

If you’re gonna be there as well, make sure to stop by and chat with us at our booth!