• 6 Posts
  • 113 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Nice to hear! At the moment the spindle, if it has the right to be called that, is a 775 motor with a chuck attached to it. Which is good enough for circuit boards and wood. Perhaps aluminium is doable as well as long as the feed rate is kept slow enough.

    Should milling steel ever be on the table I’ll make a larger machine and will use leadscrews on X and Y instead of belts and perhaps dual Z motors.

    I’ve also designed the build around materials that were readily available such as the 18mm X rails. Apparently they’re quite obscure since they aren’t sold on typical Chinese webshops.



  • Nice! Once you get the hang of it FreeCAD is quite pleasant to use in my experience. I’ve updated the OP with a gdrive link.

    I’ve designed it partially by importing step files of commercial parts such as the stepper motors, aluminium extrusions etc. They can be found on sites like grabcad. You can just make a throwaway account there since you need to sign up to download anything. At least it’s free…





  • I use a small hotplate at about 125 degrees and an aluminium baking tray. If you spread the beads out thinly it will dry pretty quickly.

    Alternatively you can use an old microwave and that should remove moisture from the silica gel in a matter of minutes. You can easily overheat them though and I would never use that microwave for food again.









  • I got an Orbiter 1.5 extruder and have been quite happy about it since. These days you’d be better off getting an Orbiter 2. As for the toolhead, there should be Ender 5 compatible mounts available on Printables or Thingiverse, if not you could design your own.

    Creality also has its own direct drive, the Sprite Pro. That may be worth looking in to as well.

    You can import a STEP model of both the Ender 5 and whatever mod you want to make to it and model your toolhead around it, that is what I did with the Mercury One project.