I've been wrapping up the last of the mechanical issues on my Hadron build. It's taking a little longer because I've been coloring outside the lines a bit. I designed the cable track routing yesterday and assembled the three Igus cable tracks, and I should be installing them today and running a lot of wires.
I'm making daily McMaster-Carr orders, trying to push this build to the finish line. That wouldn't be necessary if I had a good inventory of metric hardware. I have a Lowe's and a Home Depot a mile from my house, but I still prefer to place McMaster-Carr orders for most things. It seems to fit my work pattern - design a subsystem, order the parts that will arrive tomorrow, and then assemble the parts I designed yesterday that arrived in the brown truck today. Many days, to get a minimum order, I add metric hardware to help me finally build a metric fastener inventory. That's significantly increasing the cost.
After an initial flurry of activity and most of a Hadron emerging from a big box-o-parts, there hasn't been much apparent progress lately. I've spent a lot of time staring at the Hadron and scratching my head. I don't have fancy store bought 3D CAD software, so I do a lot of this the old fashioned way... in the real world. The parts don't turn red when there's an interference fit, but you can still tell.
Not only hasn't there been much visible progress, it actually looks like I'm going backwards. I have all of the major assemblies apart again to install the limit switches and a couple of other last minute additions like the Igus cable track. I knew the limit switches needed to be installed as I was doing the initial assembly, but I was impatient to see the big parts together and working, and didn't want all of those loose wires getting in the way. With more confidence in the eventual outcome and more experience, my next Hadron will go together a lot faster. I hope to make a series of videos to document the next build, after I know what I'm doing. A lot of people prefer to build from videos rather than reading a set of instructions.
I've taken several pictures of my first Hadron build to document it and illustrate some areas that I thought could use some additional explanation. I'll post those soon, with some comments that will hopefully help those building their first Hadron.
If you're building now and you're in a hurry for the big tip - install all limit switches as you go and wire them with long leads that you can route to the electronics later, and tie the wires into loops to manage the wiring mess as you're finishing the mechanical assembly. There's no point in putting it all together and then taking it back apart later to add limit switches when you know you're going to be needing them.