It’s 2am the morning after Thanksgiving. I’m standing in the middle of the dimly-lit kitchen bare-handing a slice of the pumpkin pie I didn’t get to try before succumbing to a food coma nine hours earlier, as I stare at the pile of aluminium sheet stock in one corner of the room…

They say “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” …it seems the same goes for “if you get a really really spiffy new hammer,” because I’ve basically been solving everything—even the most mundane of everyday needs —with my 3D printer… Well, I aim to change that with my current project, if only because trying to design all the parts to be printable was getting fucking tiresome.

For the longest time I’ve really needed a bigger plotter than my Silhouette SD (i.e. CraftRobo) because the narrow working envelope was a real limitation. I also wanted something heavy duty that could tackle more tasks…

Update: 05/14/2018 – Well, that escalated quickly slowly.

So, in the SIX MONTHS since I started writing this post—hell, in the month since I last touched it —I actually just said screw it and got a Silhouette Cameo 3, and I’ll talk about that in another post.  Anyway, at some point I’ll revisit this, but what I was getting to was the fact that I was designing a CoreXY-based plotter and I was going to build it out of aluminium.