It wasn’t that long ago that wanting to own your own 3D printer meant learning as much as you possibly could about CNC machines and then boostrapping your first printer. Now you can borrow time on one pretty easily, and somewhat affordably buy your own. If you take either of these routes you don’t need to know much about CNC, but why not use the tool to learn? This is what [Wootin24] did when building a 3D printed plotter with DVD drive parts.
Plotters made from scrapped floppy, optical drives, and printers are a popular hand, and well worth a weekend of your time. This one, however, is quite a bit different. [Wootin24] used the drives to source just the important parts for CNC precision: the rods, motors, motors, and bearings. The difference is that he designed and 3D printed his own mounting brackets rather than making do with what the optical drive parts are attached to.
This guide focuses on the gantries and the mechanics that drive them… it’s up to you to supply the motor drivers and electrical side of things. He suggests RAMPS but admins he used a simple motor driver and Arduino since they were handy.
Seems like a waste to throw away mass-manufactured injection-molded parts for something out of a relatively (to EDM or good multi-axis mold machining) sloppy 3D printer. It would be cool if someone could figure out the most common DVD drive type parts, then make adapters to use them in a multi-axis setup.
While they’re incredibly common, DVD drives have such a limited stroke that I don’t know what you can do with the parts other than for amusement and robot toys. There are people that have used the whole slide as-is. However, I’d suggest looking at scanners and 2D printers.
“and well worth a weekend of your time”
Jesus. A weekend?
Too long? Too short? I have a simmilar project waiting for a day or two free – so long as you have the parts and a little know-how this is totally doable in a weekend.
It seems way too short. I am impressed with anyone who can do this in a weekend.
While boostrapping sounds interesting, I recommend changing it to bootstrapping.
Just a quick note: Please proofread this article. A few quick notes are 2x motor and admins.