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

[Zeeflyboy]

Thanks Rob

Definitely want to make sure everything works well before doing anything on the plans/files front. Might turn out as a bag of excrement!

I've been busy re-working the X-Axis design to accommodate the larger Z-axis unit and to give me 420mm on travel in much the same footprint. If I had left it as is, I would have lost an unacceptable amount of travel due to the wider Z. To do this I moved the motor to the back plate and added a belt drive setup, which actually was another motivation for the re-design as it will make it much easier to accommodate an upgrade to servos further down the line if I decide I want to go that route. The old design is very much limited to nema 23 sized motors and it seems most servos come in at nema 24 as a minimum.

I will need to extend the Main frame in width the accommodate this new design, but that should be relatively straight forward and just a case of getting some wider extrusions and doing some adjustments to the front plates.

Still needs a little fleshing out but this is the current direction. Similar setup to the Z-axis really as that seems to have worked out nicely. For reference this is now using the extended HGH25HA carriages (I have the space now with the wider Z so why not) and longer HGR20 rails, both of which I already have in hand. Still using a 20mm tooling plate to mount the rails, which then attaches to a 200x40mm extrusion, in turn sandwiched by a 12mm rear plate.





I still have an issue here though in that these pieces are too big for my current machine, so either I try to be clever and do them each in two separate operations moving them along the bed and dowel pins to relocate, or I just outsource the two big plates which is all I need get up and running, then cut the last plates when the machine is moving. Decisions decisions.

In other news I've started accumulating equipment and doing more research on LCD anodising, which is most appealing to me given the apparent success of it in the DIY setting plus the relatively low concentration of sulphuric acid required. I want to do a proper job though so I'm going a bit beyond the typical DIY lead cathodes in a bucket with a car battery type deal, but that means more expense and complication so I'm trying to do my diligent research.

I ordered this PSU which is capable of constant current (hoping to use it for other stuff too so thought might as well get a decentish one) here

And I really wanted to achieve thorough agitation but without the splatter that enthusiastic aeration brings, so I also ordered two of these corrosion resistant magnetic drive pumps. here

I intend to use both, with the 4L/min flow each I should see around 8L per minute which will cycle the bath (currently looking at about 60L) in a little under 8 minutes. They are going to pull double duty too as I will be building a couple of heat exchangers for them to pump the solution through in order to try to have some control over the temperature of the bath.

Everyone seems to say about how having a serious amount of DI water is important for really thorough rinsing, so I also ordered a 6 stage Reverse osmosis system and will be adding a DI resin filter at the end to replace the re-mineralisation stage.

Other than that from Caswell I ordered some Grey NLN and Red Bordeaux dye, plus some aluminium degreaser, aluminium oxide and smut remover, and some nickel acetate sealer.

Still got some things left to buy when some spare cash rolls round before I can get cracking with the anodising, but excited to give it a go. Needless to say there will be a few test parts first before committing any important machined parts to the process.