@residentdj



Throw some SharkBits on those routers, and you got yourself a 3 headed Shark. Its a Monster!!! hehehe

 

Since the "outriggers" ( the two outer Z axis gantry's) as we call them, are free moving and are not tied to the nut blocks on the center Z axis gantry in any way
they could in theory just be disconnected from the back brace (20x40 V-Slot that holds them all together) and moved out to each side so you can use the machine with one router as you normally would. Note that you would lose a little cutting area on each side but should not be too bad.

The easiest way we found to do this was to:
1) With power off, jog all the Z axis plates up and make them even (best you can)
2) Add the routers leaving the router mounts a little loose
3) Take off all 3 collet nuts
4) Jog the machine back on the Y axis (away from the front of the machine) about halfway and jog the the routers to center them in the spoilers
5) Slowly lower the Z axis until all of router shafts are just resting on the spoiler boards
6) Sung each of the routers in place
7) Jog the Z axis up allowing room for a bit to be placed in
8) Loosely add the collet nuts back on
9) Loosely add the bits you plan on using (must be loose)
10) Slowly jog the Z axis back down to where the bits are all resting on the spoiler boards (Just like before with the router shafts)
11)Tighten collets
12) Raise Z - Add material - Zero bit to the top of the material and run your job

Hope this helps to answer your questions and thank you for the kind words we are excited to know that there are a lot of people out there who will benefit immensely by having the ability up their production with out the cost of a new machine.

 

No problems learning is what OpenBuilds is all about.

No need to beef them up I am using the standard Nema 23 without any problems on the machine here at HQ

 

You might take another look at the usable X width on the Z2 configuration. I'm getting 548mm not 584mm which would be just over 21.5"

 

Hi Rick, I double checked and I am seeing 586 ~23" (couple mm buffer)

 

Thanks for the clarification. I wasn't catching how efficiently you were overlapping the heads. Following that same logic though into Z3 mode, you should be able to get 15.3" using a head spacing of 390mm.

 

Rick your the man!
I was so focused on getting 12" cut width that I over looked this on the Triple Z
Mocked it up and it will work giving the users ~15" width of cutting per head.
Thank you for taking a closer look at this and for sharing the feedback, I will be working on updating all the information needed.

 

This opens the door to some cool ideas like repeating wall patterns!

 

They are run in parallel, they are not independant axes.
That makes it a bolt-on upgrade without needing to change your electronics setup