Will's Blog

I've been a fan of MakerSlide ever since building my ShapeOko CNC Mill, and have been interested in 3D printing since first hearing about the RepRap project in 2007. So when I first saw the OrdBot, I knew that it would be the printer I build. It didn't hurt that I had 10 feet of extra MakerSlide and a whole bunch of the special bearings and eccentric spacers left over from my ShapeOko build.


One of my goals was to build all the custom parts myself, the blue and black pieces in the photo above. Cutting aluminum on my new CNC machine pushed it to the limit, but worked out in the end. One of the larger OrdBot pieces is the handle, here is a shot of the ShapeOko making short work of it:



There are a couple parts that I modified or upgraded during the build. Most notably the Z axis. After reading about bent Z-rods I decided to get some ACME rods, and I wanted to use some spare Nema-23 motors that I had on hand.

The NEMA-23 motors for the Z axis were easy, I slightly modified the sto…

April of 2012 I signed up for the first batch of ShapeOko kits from inventables.com. Unsure of how popular the kit would be, inventables had a kickstarter-style order of 150 (or so) kits. That number was reached handily and several more batches followed. Since then the ShapeOko has become a standard item in their store.

I've wanted a CNC mill for a long time, but could never justify the expense. Now there are products like the MakerSlide linear rail system that made it possible for low cost machines. The first round of kits were only $200 for the entire mechanical platform - add your electronics and a dremel tool and the machine can start cutting.
So thats what I did.


The stock kit plus motors after assembly:

One of the nice things about the ShapeOko is how hackable it is. For instance if you want to make the cutting area larger you can just replace the MakerSlide with longer rails. So I added longer rails, a second Y-axis motor, a torsion box to mount everything on, a bigger rout…