Endurance Laser Eleksmaker design

thingiverse

I bought an endurance laser in December 2019 to fit to my Workbee CNC, but I now use both simultaneously on a regular basis so I went about designing my own CNC for the laser. My first thought was the Eleksmaker A3 Pro from Banggod but at £250+ i thought this was a bit expensive for just a frame. After searching round the internet, I managed to find som .dxf files for the plate set, but although I have put them here to be printed, as I have a CNC milll i was able to cut them from 5mm acrylic. The frame which I had spare from another project was 40 x 20 v groove aluminium extrusions. I used 2 pieces 750mm and 3 at 50mm which gave me a working area of about A2 paper size. I scavenged 3 Nema 17 stepper motors drive belts and Gears from an old CTC 3D printer, printed 6 of the belt tensioners and used the Eleksmaker guide to assemble the frame Next came mounting the laser. First I mounted the laser power module holder that I'd printed. This was screwed to 1 of the Y axis gantry plates. As for the laser itself, although it could have just been fixed to the X-axis gantry I decided to design a simple mechanism that used just an M5 long bolt to allow me to raise and lower the laser to get fine focus. All done. but then I added a couple of after thoughts. Now I had been using MDF as a base but this caused scorching to the underside of the work. I have now placed a 1.5mm sheet of stainless steel as a base, this now dispurses the heat and leaves a perfect cut on both sides of the work, I used 90 degree corner blocks to secure the sheet to the X and Y axis rails. I also added a whip aerial to the design to mount the Laser and stepper wires so the weren't dragging over the machine, I could have used drag chains but as my shop is small. I'm always trying to save space The controller for this machine was just a simple Eleksmaker Mana SE 3.2 although I found out that the original Arduino Nano board was useless and wouldn't flash. so I purchased another from ebay this was fixed again to the Y axis gantry under the laser control module. I still have some things to work out, I.e. limit switches but I have a working machine that is perfect for me, and cast me less than £80 should I have purchased the things I used.