Desktop beast

The majority of material has come in now, just the bed to order from Alimex.
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Made another change to the gantry side pieces as I somehow ordered them 20mm less in width, no biggy just annoying that I now have 20mm of stick out further on the spindle. The sick sensors arrived from a friend in Netherlands and also kindly supplied some tooling plate along with it that was scrap to him.

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Started also making the smaller parts as I wait on some mist coolant setup so I can then begin on the larger plates. Ballscrew support mount for the Z axis and also the gantry servo motor mount machined.

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The fiber sensors look real cool, any progress on those? How do you interface those with the control system?

Input/export wise electrically into them they use a 4pin cable although only 3 of those are needed. VCC, 0V and signal just like any sensor mainly but the fibre side is a twin fibre cable, output LED and return LED which push fit into the ports on the side of the sensor. The fibre cables can be trimmed to length using the provided single use cutters. Adjusting them is done via the led panels on top where you can adjust all sorts of parameters and modes, we're trying to at the moment figure out if we can have them working as max and min limits but its looking like it may just be a single parameter use.

Here's a rough setup of the cables connected, you can see the receiving end of the fibre optics shining on the red croc clip.

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The builds moving on quite fast now I've started with the actual machining of parts, if you haven't already try DLC coated tooling as it leaves an absolutely amazing mirror finish.

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A dry fit of the parts to check fit and things, counterbores are a little tight as they're right on the lower limit of tolerance so a few need some re-work and boring a little larger by 0.1mm.

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Once the other tooling arrives this week I can then start on the large pieces for the gantry sides and framework end pieces.

Made quite significant progress this week with machining more components.

Both gantry sides are mostly complete, each has chamfer ops on the rear side so they will be flipped and located into a jig from the negative shape of them for ease of locating.
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The spacer blocks are all finished, these extend out from the carriages to clear the frame and also act as a method for the gantry to be trammed so they are independent, on the other side of the spacer blocks are the ballscrew mounts which you can see have bolts at the bottom of the spacer.
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The mechanism of the cam you can see here, an offset of 0.5mm when rotated 180 degrees gives me around 2-3 mm of travel at the top of the gantry so there is plenty there with very fine adjustment capability.
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The final top plate where the motor mount is to be bolted and also yet machined is completed minus the rear operations to create the counterbores and chamfers.
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A few design changes also, mostly to break up the horrible flat surfaces on the end pieces with a more showing off textural look to them. These will be pocket cut to ensure there is some lovely helical tool marks that are consistent instead of adaptive where you will otherwise lose them as it drags the tool back over.
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The bed has arrived thanks to Metalex and Alimex, a superb company if you haven't already dealt with them as they sorted out a damaged delivery no problem and had a new one out on delivery within a few days. They are also significantly cheaper than a certain warehouse.

Thanks for the heads up for Metalex/Alimex, I'll give them a try next time I need some plate, it'll be interesting to see how their prices compare to Smiths. How accurate was their cutting BTW?

If anything its slightly oversize on length by .5mm so no complaints. 1000x600x12 tooling plate cost me £195.5 with £35 delivery on a pallet.

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Amazing price for the plate!
Your build is looking really good, will follow this closely.

Thankyou, there's a lot more been done since the last post. I've not been doing much as there doesn't seem to be much activity on here anymore. We have a discord where we talk and share some mad ideas if you are interested.

Got through the machining on both end pieces which turned out quite nice, bullnose mill and .5 chamfer on the tops.
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Those parts came out really good!
Yes Rob, I'd like to get into the discord, I'm addicted to DIY CNC Lol

How can i?