Since I’m replacing the RF tube with a Chinese glass tube, I’ll have to fabricate the mounting brackets. The buildlog 2.0 laser uses plastic brackets cut out of HDPE on a CNC router. I’ve cut HDPE before and it’s great stuff to work with on the router and I even have enough left over from an earlier project.
I started by mounting two pieces of 1/8″ aluminum square tube to the existing mounting holes on the frame of the laser. This will give a nice solid base to attach the brackets to. It also has clearance behind for routing wires and enough room to turn the bottom adjusting screw.
I got pretty lucky here. I took some careful measurements with a digital caliper and found that with this arrangement of support structures, the stock buildlog brackets work almost perfectly unmodified. In fact, I could have used them just be adding a single #10 washer between the bracket and the square tube. Since I’m cutting my own, I made the small change to the design in HeeksCAD and routed them out.
Drilling the mounting holes on the mill.
Tapping the square-tube rails
This is looking down the ‘bore’ of the brackets. Using my specially calibrated eye-crometer I’d say the alignment looks pretty good!
Now to test fit the tube. I get nervous every time I unwrap this thing. It looks, and probably is, crazy delicate. My plan is to build a metal shroud that will wrap around the tube and keep it from getting whacked.
Test fitting the tube:
