Last weekend, I made an incredibly accurate CNC pen-plotter bot in just 20 minutes, for a total expenditure of $0. How did I pull this off? Hacks accumulate.
In particular, the main ingredients were a CNC router, some 3D-printed mounts that I’d designed and built for it, and a sweet used linear rail that I picked up on eBay as part of a set a few years back because it was just too good of a deal. If you had to replicate this build exactly, it would probably take a month or two of labor and cost maybe $2,000 on top of that. Heck, just tuning up the Chinese 6040 CNC machine alone took me four good weekends and involved replacing the stepper motors.
Oh yeah, dowels as end stops for lifting the pen
On Sunday night, I had all this stuff on hand, so for me it was free, fast, and the path of least resistance. But it’s an objectively horrible idea. The linear rail is holding a pen, although it is designed to hold hundreds of newtons of side-force. Consequently, it weighs a lot. You wouldn’t be able to strap it to your 3D printer chassis, which is normally a fantastic way to make a pen plotter. But I didn’t need to, and the CNC can swing weight like that around all day without even complaining.
The custom mounts? I designed it a couple years ago to hold the vacuum hose for the dust shoe. But because the CNC makes such a convenient platform for all kinds of hacks, I printed out five of them. So far, I’ve put on a laser head, a vinyl cutter, and now a pen ..
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