El Beast - Initial design phase, comments and critique welcomed!

**Lee Roberts** · 07-11-2022

Originally Posted by zeeflyboy

hello ��

woop woop he's alive !!!!

**Zeeflyboy** · 07-11-2022

Still ticking, for now at least!

The reason why there are no pics of the completed build are because the whole thing got shelved - not real reason other than lack of time with the young'uns, and to be honest mercurial interests taking me temporarily elsewhere!

I haven't been completely idle, as mentioned by Lee I built a full motion rig for VR during the last year or so (along with my own design of pedals, wheel etc), and also built a new mahoosive 3D printer (a 400x400x400mm V-core 3) which is frankly an awesome bit of kit which can print about 4x faster than my old printer and with better quality while it does it. I have some plans to mod that printer further too, but that can wait somewhat for now.

Anyhoo, reason for posting is that I have finally dragged the beast back out of hiding in the depths of the man cave and been quietly doing some work on it as time permits (something that has been in sadly short supply recently as work has been busy!).

So I had reached a small impasse where due to changes I needed to stretch the old design width wise, but didn't want to completely waste all the work I had already done, plus the increased width just added new challenges with the size limitations of my current machine. I had a think about what I needed to do to repurpose the existing parts and came up with a plan to get things built up and working to a point that I can use the new machine to make the final replacement parts.

So... here's the first bit of progress in a long time:

First things first, I needed to extend the front and back faceplates. To do this I chucked them back in the CNC, turned them into separate pieces, and 3d printed a spacer block... again this entire piece will eventually be replaced with a single solid part once the beast is up and running.

Next up I need to extend the internal cross extrusions, and I again turned to the 3D printer using one of my favourite new materials which is CF reinforced ASA - incredibly stiff and strong, high temperature and UV resistant and machines quite well! I printed the blocks slightly over sized and then finished them off in the CNC to keep tolerances as tight as possible. This will also be a candidate part for being re-made in aluminium once the full machine is up and running.

And then I created some threaded rod inserts on the lathe, press fit and further secured with sleeve lock.

And with that, the bottom section is almost completed:

The only thing left to do before moving on is remake the side mount plates in 20mm plate (previously 16mm) and make a cross brace for the ballscrew mounts. I have Just finished one of the new side plates today and hopefully get the second one done this week.

Bonus videos:

As an aside, I've been using thread mills to tap the parts during the milling operation and it's been a bit of a revelation! So much better than using a tap like some sort of troglodyte!

In other news, it's also all being slightly tweaked to accommodate 60mm 400w AC servos (fairly easy just by changing to MBA-12D mounts and tweaking some clearances).