Saturday, overview of source materials and goals

So I've been reading all these fun posts on people making CNC laser cutters with nothing but some old printers, scanners and a CDROM drive. Being somewhat of a tinkerer myself, I decided to give it a go.

We've had a Canon MP530 break on us and had an old Lexmark and HP sitting in storage as well. So I dragged them into the garage where eager tools were waiting to take them apart! The printers looked a bit weary of it all,.. and for good reason. :)

So first order of business is to assess what those puppies contain.

Both the Lexmark and the Canon are multi function printers as such they contain a scanner. From looking into the printers I figure I can take out the metal print head bridge and use it without too much modifications. This will be my X-axis holding the laser. The Y-axis will be the scanner maybe even in it's tray. Like in the picture below.

The bridge uses a DC motor with position encoder and the scanner uses a stepper with 4 wires. Now lets go find out how hard it is to control these.