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

[Zeeflyboy]

Just interested in some thoughts of this slightly different approach to mounting the rails in reference to the eco-cast bed. One of the rails in particular has a very slight bend it seems (not unusual apparently from my research), and the method I used of clamping the carriage with a spacer isn't working quite as well as hoped due to what I assume is the steel rail bending down the 20mm bed surface rather than being pulled up during the clamping.

I designed this little spacer which would be screwed into the extrusion and has some up/down movement on the screw slots and are slim enough to pass under the carriage. The idea would be to drill the extrusion to take 6 of these along the length of the Y-axis. they could be butted up against the bed plate and then screwed down into place, then the rail can be clamped against them while fastening. Basically ending up similar to having a machined lip for the rail to butt up against.



The plan for making these would be to align them on the machine in such a way that the important dimension (height) would all be cut on the same part of the ballscrew to minimise any potential variation.