X-Carve: Finding Your Own Wiring And Terminal Blocks

Like I mentioned in the ordering post, I though I had some 18/4 shielded wire lying around, and even if I didn’t how expensive could it be to purchase some? Well, I scavenged through all of my stuff and only found a whole bunch of unshielded 22/2 which might not even work for connecting the limit switches. At this point I figured I’d better step back and figure out how much wire I needed.

If you look at the wiring step of the instructions, for the 1000mm machine it says you’ll need (1) 5′ length, (1) 7′ length, and (2) 12′ lengths of 18/4, which is 36′ of wire. Although I was reading this good set of assembly notes on the Inventables discussion forum and the guy said that Inventables was a bit stingy with the wire and there’s very little slack. So I figured I’d pick up 50′ of 18/4 shielded just to be sure.

So I started looking into buying some shielded 18/4 online. The more I looked, the more the $30 for the wiring and terminal block looked better and better. The only problem is if you don’t order it when you order the kit, you have to buy it separately on the Inventables website where they charge $1 a foot. So I took the advice of the forum poster and went to Home Depot and picked up 50′ of 18/4 shielded security wire for $0.61/foot.

As for terminal blocks, my local Ax-Man had 4 terminal and 12 terminal blocks. So I picked up the required blocks for about $8.I’m worried about the hole patterns for mounting the blocks, but I guess I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

In short rather than pay $30 up front, I spent around $40 and wasted a bunch of hours trying to hunt down the parts.