Maslow CNC for the Masses

Since having one project is never enough, I’m always having at least 4 run at the same time and very occasionally actually completing them.  One of my side jobs is furniture making, Princess being the primary recipient  of my efforts.  Over the years every stick of furniture in home base has been built by me.  The only exception is chairs, because they have curves and are fairly cheap to just buy.  If you need cabinets, tables, or chests of drawers then I’m your man.  Princess has adjusted to the long lead time between ordering and delivery over the years, the world record is now standing at 6 years.  Over the last few years I’ve seen some practical CNC machines coming to market.  Shaper Maker is one, but when they started selling them kind of pricey at around $1500.  Then last year a kickstarter project  called Maslow CNC started running.  Here was a machine that could handle full sheets of plywood for under $500!  So I immediately signed up of course, and like all kickstarter campaigns this one slipped a bit, by the time I got the kit the slip was a total of 4 months.  About a month later in October 2017 I got around to building the machine.  My son was also fairly excited about the machine since he does woodworking also.  Unlike me, he enjoys impossible projects with lot’s of curves.  So this machine could meet both of our needs.  http://www.maslowcnc.com

 

The inventor’s plan was that you take the Maslow’s parts, set up a crude version of the machine then run some files to make parts for the final machine.  This was good in theory but after fooling around with it for awhile I found it much easier to just cut the parts out by hand.  It helps to have a wife with access to a large plotter to print out templates.  Soon I was ready to no kidding make something with it.  It was a real bear to calibrate, taking over two hours.  I started making some test shapes at which time I noticed things seemed to go well for awhile, then as the sled holding the router reached toward the top of it’s work area one chain or the other would jump a tooth or so around the sprocket, ruining the piece and the calibration.  This was due to a slight misalignment of the chains coupled with not enough tension on the nonworking portion of the chain.  Fortunately about this time it was once time to leave for Water Island so I left things sitting as they were for a couple of months and stewed.

A couple of weeks ago I decided it was time to get serious about the Maslow again.  One of the great things about having 5000 people buy something that’s not working right is that given enough time somebody will come up with a solution.  So as I got into the Maslow forums I discovered that somebody had come up with a solution that wouldn’t take too many modifications to what I had already built.  Buttercup had just broken her recliner and was making due with a plastic trashcan as a footrest.  So the first project would be this: https://amzn.to/2L67XQ6  I had several years before started on a copy of this chair but quit once I had a working scrap plywood prototype to sit in, complete with a surplus boat cushion.  As the years went on I kept sitting in it and it became a real conversation piece.  Plus the proportions were slightly off so almost no one except for me could figure out how to sit in it, so it kept trespassing to a minimum.

Using some photos and standard proportion measurements I had soon made the template in the computer for the new chair’s side pieces.  Fired up the Maslow and this was the result:

Encourage by the success I headed to Home Depot and got 3 more sheets of the cheapest plywood I could find.  Over the years of owning boats Buttercup and I had been frustrated by the inflatable dinghies we had used.  Yes, they don’t sink and are good in rough water but no matter how hard you tried somebody always ended up with a wet butt once the ride was over.  So I had looked for a better dinghy design and was impressed by this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA6cDk2Imb0  I contacted the designer Craig, and he made us a slightly larger 12 foot version to fit our bigger engine.  The plan was to build this in Texas and ship to Water Island with the other building supplies.  He too was excited about the Maslow so he shared with me the CAD drawings.

Yesterday ran the first trial run of the Magic Carpet parts with the cheap plywood.  If I could get them to work I would use the machine to cut the expensive foam core for the actual dinghy.  If the sled is kept more toward the center of the machine it seemed to work well.  It had problems around the periphery of the piece.  This is due to the way the chains attach to the sled.  There is a newer version of the sled that fixes this, I have the parts on order.  The part that is in the very middle of the workpiece is the front of the keel panel, it came out well.

Measuring the dimensions later I found that the pieces are within .5 MM of the plans, so when I get the new sled it’ll be full speed ahead on building the dinghy.