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

[driftspin]

That's why you ALWAYS use a hammer to put it together. Pre-empt the pain..!

Wal.

Hahaha best advice of the day ! :-)


Grtz. Bert


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[Zeeflyboy]

Hah thanks guys. Either going to anodise or powder coat, both should keep it looking nice through some gentle abuse!

Little micro update (been busy barbecuing today!)

3D printed a mount for the homing switch magnet and fitted. To set the activation range I just hooked the switch up to 24v and moved things around until the LED switched off at the right place.

[Zeeflyboy]

More work done today... Didn't have any suitable materials for the counter bearing plate so got cracking with some of the other stuff!

First up, 6mm spacer for the ball nut mount to make it reach the front plate:










And then on to a big piece (so big it takes up most of my poor little X6's bed!) - the front mount plate

Externally clamped and all the interior parts done




external clamps removed and finished part:




Fitted along with the previously printed plugs. Other large hole will be for ball nut grease port which I'm currently working out the finer details of.




Full up:




Full down:

[Nr1madman]

Im envious!
Looks real nice

Skickat från min SM-G955F via Tapatalk

[Zeeflyboy]

Had a productive day or two... apart from some minor things left to do, the Z-axis is now completed.

First up I made the top counter bearing plate. I had planned this to be 10mm but I only had 12mm and rather than skim it down I decided to just roll with the 12mm instead so tweaked the design.






Flipped and rear chamfer




I also made another knurled knob on the lathe, this time for the tension adjust. Same process as last time so I won't show it again




While cutting the tramming plate I had a bit of a booboo - I was trying out a full 16mm depth of cut with 0.8mm axial engagement, which was actually working ok until it turns out the stock wasn't perfectly squared up to the bed and on the far side it started taking much more than 0.8mm... caught it just as it came to a stop all gummed up. Need to give it a bath in some Lye to de-gunk it.



Unfortunately this mishap resulted in some machining error which I didn't pick up on until afterwards as I thought I hit feed hold in time. Thankfully nothing too serious - the holes that mount the spindle are just about 0.3mm off from the rest in X - everything else is fine so I'm not going to re-do.

So with that tramming plate done, the Z-axis is now more or less complete. I just need to shorten and tidy up the ball screw extension piece, make a small collar for the tensioner and then at some point I need to apply a finish. I'm currently leaning towards sandblasting and then anodising for a nice matt anodised finish.

Anyway, here are some assembled shots... everything is nice and smooth to turn by hand with no binding. The tramming adjustment works especially nicely now that I extended the shoulder bolt around which it pivots and the shoulder bolt that goes through the eccentric nut into the plate behind.








And here is one for reference to the current machine. This thing is huge! Gonna need a bigger boat...

[RobC]

Honestly your work astounds me, I always enjoy every night clicking through to see if you have updated any further work! I would love to purchase the part files or supply the material and pay you to make them if and when you may consider such!

[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.

[Zeeflyboy]

Hi guys,

Sorry there hasn't been any progress recently - a general mix between work ramping up for the summer, enjoying the nice weather, with a dash of laziness and a sprinkle of lack of disposable income.

Anyway, thought I'd share what little I have managed to do - the pump and agitation setup for my anodising tub. As mentioned previously I wanted something a little more reliable than bubbles and something that would reduce fumes/slpashing/condensation.

So I scrapped the two pumps I originally ordered, as after disassembling them I found that they have metal springs for the diaphragm despite being labelled as suitable for corrosives. Shame. Ended up ordering a big proper mains powered chemical pump instead which is designed specifically for this sort of stuff.

First up since the pump isn't self priming and I want to be able to put a sealed lid on the container when not in use I needed to make some bulkheads for the "tank" (the tank is a polypropylene storage container). I managed to find some fibre re-inforced polypropylene filament for the 3D printer which is perfect for making water tight sulphuric acid proof fittings.... albeit a slight PITA to print with due to warping. This is the end result, and it accepts a large Viton O-ring which then seals the fitting against the tank wall. I then 3D printed the "nut" out of ABS since it's less of a pain in the arse than the polypropylene filament and isn't exposed to the bath.





With pump (attached by pure EPDM tubing)




Leak tested for a few days and nothing to see. Happy times...


I had also read a paper on using eductors in anodising tubs which sounded interesting - for those that don't know they basically work on the principle of flow multiplication... a high speed jet is shot out the nozzle and induces a flow through the cone to improve mixing. I couldn't really find any decently designed ones that were small enough for my purposes so I designed some myself. Again 3D printed these from the Polypropylene with a G1/4 mounting thread. I also needed something to hold them at the right angles for a good spread and designed a block for them to screw into.








And then connected them up with 12mm PVC tubing which is a tight push fit.




To test whether this work achieved anything at all I figured it would be interesting to put some food dye into the tub and see how effectively the liquid is being circulated and mixed. Pretty happy with the result! I like the second view in the video, looks cool and you can see the eductors doing their thing quite nicely.




Got a bit more work to do on getting a nice setup for the cathodes and bus bar, but shouldn't be too long now until I can try some anodising.

[jarjar]

Awesome work and project Zeeflyboy!

Do you mind sharing some details about your Z axis? For example, what are its overall dimensions and what's the length of its rails and travel?

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.

25 rails or HGH20HA carriages?

[Zeeflyboy]

Thanks - hopefully the effort will be worth it and I can get some good consistent anodising results.

The 3D printer I use is my old trusty Makergear M2. I think they have an M3 out these days but it’s been an absolute workhorse over the last 6 or 7 years.... work area is 200x250x200mm

I’ve always meant to replace it with a bigger badder printer (ideally self designed) one day but just haven’t found an overwhelming need as it works great. I have changed over to a duet WiFi from the old Rambo board, and it rocks an e3d v6 and Titan for hotend/extruder and I like to use printbite as a build surface, but other than that it’s remarkably unmodified.