The only problem is that the machine is made of cheap materials,making it somewhat unsturdy. A machine like this:OpenBuilds OX CNC Machine | OpenBuilds
would be more along the lines of what I would like. Is there anyway to hack the design of the sturdy cnc machine and make it into a 3d printer cnc combo? P.S. this is my first build and my knowledge is somewhat limited. Thank you.
I think the most difficult process of this is going to be the software as you can just strap a 3D printing head onto a CNC head holder and use the motion control of the CNC mill to do the work you are looking to do. I have been looking at this process for a while and plan on using my custom CNC builds to base my own 3D atomic deposition printer designs on.
I have an proxxon mf70 cnc where i Controlled it successfully using reprap ramps 1.4 board i tweaked marlin and i could cut a pcb with Eagle pcb-gcode .. in Winter i Do a ballbearing conversion with an 43 mm miller head where you can also put print head on ... that May point you in the right direction ..
It can be done but you'll probably want two different motion control packages, one for CNC like LinuxCNC, and some other one that also runs on a PC with a parallel port. With luck you could get it to the point where a quick restart on the computer or so forth is all that's needed to switch over.
Jm why you want this ?
You generate gcode and Run it ..
Even with ramps and LCD you can manually Control the axis Set 0 and go no hassle with PC ..
And i tried Even linuxcnc on beaglebone that Looks also promising ..
There are many people who have put an extruder on CNC milling machines there is no problem using Mach 3 there are couple slicing software's that you can set for Mach 3 kisslicer and sli3r. You basically run two external temperature controllers for the extruder and heated bed and set your slicing software to Mach 3 hear is a picture of one I built. If you Google large scale repstrap I think you'll see some more pictures
so I decided to make the 3d printer cnc machine combo (Combination CNC Machine and 3D Printer). The only problem is finding a four axis cnc kit that fits the specifications he laid out. In general,the kits I find on ebay are too powerful. Any ideas on where to find a four axis cnc kit like the one he specifies without breaking the bank? I decided to make this kit because I only have a limited amount of money and I don't know the first thing about cnc machines or 3d printers.