Ah, but Alex, isn't that what we model railroader's do. I'm also printing all the detail parts for the mill. BTW, I model in N scale. And some of the printed parts
That is an awesome model. I have to thank you model railroaders for posting models on thingiverse. I was building some mason bee houses out of fence boards from an old fence that got blown over by the wind. I was happy with my design but the roof lacked detail. So, I found a railroad model that had individual tile roof panels and I downloaded just those .stl files so I can do a 3d carve of those panels into wood.
Thanks for the nice comment. I can't take much credit for adding to thingiverse. I've only added 3 or 4 is all. Glad you found something that worked. Thingiverse does have a lot of interesting items and I've used a few.
Yesterday, I was trying to engraving some N scale brick on some plywood, and discovered I had a backlash issue on the Y axis. Looking at the belts, both belts was somewhat loose. The right one was looser than the left and I 'm sure it's from being operated and the belts getting broke in. I adjusted the belts and I could of called it good, but I'm going to go ahead and cut a 18" square and make sure it's still square. Then I'll do another beam alignment to ease my mind. Then I'll do some test to see if I still have the correct setting for the "Y" axis backlash.
Fired up the laser yesterday and my chiller apparently has quit working. When I bought in back in June of 2018, I got what I thought was a very good deal on it for $340. Now it looks like a very bad deal. It's a B & H CW5000. While checking it out, the compressor runs, so I'm hoping it just low on Freon. It doesn't have a Freon charging port, so I bought a kit to add one. It should be here today and we'll see if it works. The book says it uses 134A, so that's good. I don't have $500 right now to buy another one. If all else fails, I'll make one like this DIY 5289 Btu/h chiller - RDWorksLab.com
My water chiller is a 1 gallon bottle of frozen water placed in the distilled water bucket reservoir. I use a wireless meat thermometer and an old android phone to monitor temps. It keeps it in the proper temp range for a couple hours.
Yea, My backup is a 40 foot coil of 3/8" copper tubing in a 5 gal bucket of ice and water. I just use the pump on the chiller to circulate the water. I have a digital thermometer on the main panel and the one on the chiller to monitor the temperature. I used it for about 10 hours yesterday with this setup and temp never got above 15 degree C. It's just a pain in the ***. Good thing I have about 300 lbs of ice in the freezer.
UPDATE I installed the Freon fill kit right after I received it and installation was very easy. Filled with 134A and the chiller has worked well since. Have about 350 hours of use on the laser now without any other problems.
