New build with recycled parts on a ridiculous budget 120cm*60cm work area

[Desertboy]

China post is working efficiently at the moment the bearings came! 11 days from ordering! And we had no post since Friday so might have been quicker!


They slide super smooth after adjustment very happy with them making me rethink the supported rail for a larger machine as it's a lot cheaper than hiwin style rail and the accuracy will be fine for my purpose.


Hopefully the ballscrews which only went out today will be as quick ;) They will get import tax I'm sure. I've ordered a lot from china recently and a few things were over the limit but just but these screws are over £250 so bastards will screw me.

My 1.5m Hiwin rails came as well today ;) (Like xmas but better because it's stuff I actually want) I think the Hiwin rails are too small 15mm for the purpose but they were cheap and a decent length 1500mm with 4 carriages so I've gone with them to get it working and will get something more suitable in the near future. Will work exclusive wood based products until I change these and if I really need to do aluminium just doing it very slowly with a low cut height.


I'm already thinking though I should have spent another £150 on top and got 2 1.5m supported rails as I have 8 bearing blocks and the supported rail is stupid strong. (The printer I took it off have a sliding carriage that was over 400kg's and powered by a puny nema 23 lol.)

[Desertboy]

I did some basic cad so I can work out the mounting plates so I can either manufacture them myself or get them manufactured but unfortunately my decent computer is at work at moment so had to use the old laptop which doesn't support decent quality renders so this is the basic rendering made everything different colours to make it easy to see what's going on.

Need to add the ballscrews in of course and motor mounts but this laptop is so slow, will worry about z axis when I've actually build it ;)

Glad I started to cad out as I already see a few things I should tweak winging it was a stupid idea lol.

[Desertboy]

Eyeing up cheap ass T6600 drivers and breakout board for control instead of the arduino but maybe I should slum it with the arduino for now and get a better controller. Certainly Arduino, cnc shield and Polou drivers will be enough to test the machine.

[Desertboy]

I think I will make custom T nuts so I can offset the hole to align with the Supported rail mounts to ease mounting.



I think me and my friend can make them with his router table but I will probably have them cnc milled to make my life easy to get everything straight.

The other choice is have the extrusion drilled through accurately and then bolt through the extrusion. This might be cheaper BUT I intend to swap the supported rail for new rail at some point and the rail I have now has a different (Wider) mount to standard supported rail. So I end up with holes where I don't want them.

[Desertboy]

I mixed up my understanding of milling and router machines so this is in the wrong place but hey hoe ;)


Starting work on my z axis ;)


Which means I'm is stripping so I can sort rebuilding this. Getting the bearings out will be fun ;) I do want to reuse these as they be far better quality than anything I would buy.

I need to get a proper plan for rebuilding this sorted as it's obviously very important lol.

[Desertboy]

Should I use 3 bearing blocks instead of 2? For the supported rail, I had a lucky find on the aluminium extrusion side which means I can build it with 1.2m supported rails but only 1m ballscrew (actual travel ~85cm) so I can easily put 3 bearings per slide without affecting travel.

[Desertboy]

Ballscrews are in Standstead ;) so hopefully Monday they will arrive although we shall see how much import tax we get.

Tracking shows they did nothing for a week and then in 2 days it's here I wonder in future if I can pay a little extra for Fedex not to sit on it for a week lol.

I ordered them on the 28th took a week for the Chinese to organise fedex then a week for fedex to collect lol and then air mail in 2 days without the 14 days of mucking about they would have been super quick.

I ordered other stuff from china since that came quicker in the normal ems post lol.

[Zeeflyboy]

I did some basic cad so I can work out the mounting plates so I can either manufacture them myself or get them manufactured but unfortunately my decent computer is at work at moment so had to use the old laptop which doesn't support decent quality renders so this is the basic rendering made everything different colours to make it easy to see what's going on.

Need to add the ballscrews in of course and motor mounts but this laptop is so slow, will worry about z axis when I've actually build it ;)

Glad I started to cad out as I already see a few things I should tweak winging it was a stupid idea lol.

Seems it would be better to built the gantry spanning the shorter width of the machine? Any particular reason you are building it that way around?

Gantry tends to be the weak point in terms of allowing flex, the shorter the span the more rigid it will be for any given thickness/extrusion type.

[Desertboy]

Seems it would be better to built the gantry spanning the shorter width of the machine? Any particular reason you are building it that way around?

Gantry tends to be the weak point in terms of allowing flex, the shorter the span the more rigid it will be for any given thickness/extrusion type.

Morning,
There's some logic in my madness lol I have 2 1.3m long supported rails 25mm and 2 1.5m 15mm hiwin with 4 carriages. The 25mm supported rail can handle very high load I know this because I recovered the rail from a commercial printer (I've bought new bearings all round) and it was originally carrying a very heavy gantry in the 100's of kg's and was lovely and smooth to move. The 15mm hiwin are probably nowhere near as strong so I decided that the 25mm supported rail should carry the most weight (Gantry and Z axis) and the Hiwin only carry the z axis.

I'm committed to making the long axis the gantry as I only have 1 1.4m ballscrew and 2 1m ballscrews.

The Gantry will be made from Heavy duty 100mm*50mm profile which I may or may not enclose in angle steel to strengthen it up.

I want to be able to process wood at a decent speed and occasionally aluminium reduced feed rate is fine and I have compressed air on tap in almost unlimited quantities during work hours.

I've had a score of more chunkier aluminium for the frame (I won't use for gantry it would eat too much travel) so the frame will be different and bit more square. I was going to cut down the supported rails to 1m but not going to do that now. Will update the model when I get the extrusion (Tomorrow hopefully I need to go cut it out a machine). By eye it looks like it's 9*13.5cm (2*3)

[Desertboy]

Blue bits are aluminum plate to mount everything together, been through 3 different designs to solve the 15mm HIWIN/Ballscrew problem but happy with this one.