Show must go on ...

After a longer break - there's still some family - we got together again to build.

The plastic parts from electronic-things are in a good shape, the holes for all the screws and nuts are well fitted. The nut traps are rather too small than to big, but thats a minor problem which can be fixed by warming the nuts with a heatgun. Two of the nut traps are a little bit too big, there we must be careful not to loose the nuts while working on it. 

Current Condition

While working on the Y Axis we had some problems with our drilling holes, which we transfered from the drilling patterns. I didn't read about such problems anywhere else, so i suppose that we just got some distortion in the print. The displacement was big enough that the smooth rods will be bend if we try to fix it this way. So it would not run as smooth as required.

We decided to use the left smooth rod as our reference point for the rest of the Y axis. After setting everything to 'normal' on the fittings, we still get an displacement of about 1 cm on the right smooth rod. Lucky as we are this is enough to drill new holes for the mounts. Thanks god we used wood :)
Now we got too many drilling holes there, but with a few drops of paint nobody will ever see this.
It's the first of the printers, we will do a better job on the second one.

Y Stepper Motor

As we were trying to tension the belt for the y axis, we have seen that there is also a small displacement between the motor and the belt mounts on the Y carriage. It would be ok if not the belt mount in the front would bounce against the motor mount. So we have no chance to ever reach the endswitch for this axis. So we dismounted the y carriage again to move the belt mounts. Now the belt runs centered on the pulley.

The endswitch is still out of reach by about 1 mm because the bearing mount on the left side Y carriage bounces against the mount of the smooth rod. So we decided to do a quick an dirty fix by glueing a small piece of plastic on the right bearing mount to reach the endstop.

X axis stepper

Assembling the X axis was like lego. Putting together some platic parts - with smooth rods. This was fast and it was nearly impossible to make mistakes. As we inserted the bearings we must be carefull because there are really tight fit. But after some warming with the heatgun this was no problem. This tip was by the printer of the plastic parts, thanks again. I suppose they made bad experiences with this.

We placed a small piece of foamed rubber under the motors of the Z axis to have an acoustic decoupling and still a clear reference for the mounting height. If this wouldn't be enough we could pull the rubber out and got 2 mm space between the motor and the ground pane.

We put an small piece of silicone tube on the stepper axis to make them bigger and a better fit for the motorcouplings and the 8mm threaded rod.
The motor couplings are not really inspiring confidence. I see the intention - to make more parts printable - but i suppose we will replace them against some couplings made out of metal.

Same for the Pulleys. We had printed these in the FabLab on the Stratasys printer because we wanted to use GT2 belts (the printed parts are for T5). The quality of the print is good, but i suppose made from aluminum would be better. But this will be decided in the future.

Nothing more to do for this day, it's getting late. But we're not in a hurry. The hole thing is ab 'big grin' project. Often you can see us with a big grin just pushing carriages on their smooth rods. Just like little boys with their first toy train.

But there is still many to do. Wiring, which should be clean and logic, the upper mounts from the Z smooth rods, which must be placed as exact as possible and the extruder must be assembled.