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

[Zeeflyboy]

Yeah it does look good and is growing on me. Saw it in the daylight today and it does look nice...

Next time I get a chance to play I will anodise a scrap piece to 0.6 mil and see how that looks, I suspect at 1mil the dye colour is just too strong and causing the blackness but the only way to be sure is to try!

[Zeeflyboy]

Oh and speaking of daylight, I got a better picture that is more representative of how the red looks in person - you can sort of see the deep metallic sheen here... must say I love the colour.

[Nickhofen]

Ferrari red! : )

[AlexDoran]

Fantastic

[Zeeflyboy]

Thought I would do one more experiment based on a suggestion from dharmic, I took 0.5L of my already-mixed-to-instructions dye and diluted it with a further 1.5L of DI water... so waaaay more dilute than specified. The part being anodised was my tensioner roller, I anodised as before with 6amps/sqft to a theoretical thickness of 1mil and then used the diluted dye at 60 degrees celsius followed by a nickel acetate seal.

Any guesses as to the colour?

BLAAAAAACK.

So as far as I can tell, with my particular setup/dye/pixie dust, grey is pretty much impossible for me to achieve.

[routercnc]

Black it is then !

The contrasting text looks nice. When you machine each part is there a reference block or fixture so after anodising it can go back on the CNC in the right place to engrave the letters ?
What engraving tool are you using and to what depth ?
Great work by the way.

[Zeeflyboy]

Cheers.

To etch the lettering I'm chucking it in the CO2 laser - because it's a Glowforge it's a bit of an unusual one for zeroing a part. You can drag stuff directly where you want it using the top down camera but that's not quite perfect yet, so I tend to burn some reference marks into a piece of card/paper and line the part up with that if I need accurate alignment.

[Tom J]

Even bearing with red seal - so nice
every colour with black will looks good - keep to colours

[Zeeflyboy]

Hah thanks, very kind. Yes I did specifically go with the red seal bearings because OCD lol....

I tried out driving the Z-axis and while it works beautifully (there appears to be no lost motion and no backlash I can measure using my 0.01mm DTI), if I try to ramp up the acceleration higher I get a fault on the motor drive, which was surprising given it's unloaded but suggests that it's failing to follow the steps asked (closed loop drive).

I thought back to a comment about rotational mass and had another look at my pulleys, which were solid steel. The main one was seriously heavy.... so why not an experiment!

Bought some AT5 pulleys and belt, same ratio as before but this time the belt is steel reinforced and more importantly the pulleys are aluminium.

Of course we can't be dealing with stock... so modification time. I wanted to anodise the aluminium to increase wear resistance but of course that required me to remove the steel belt retainers. To make putting the belt on easier I decided to have the new ones be removable.

So first to the lathe for some slimming down of the necks





Next to the router for some drill holes and weight loss cut outs






Bubble bubble




Cut out some belt retainers from some spare stock




Fitted them to the pulley to apply a 60 degree chamfer and do some smoothing:




Anodised and laser etched




Comparison - Old steel 28T HTD pulley, unmodified 28T AT5 pulley, and the modified 28T AT5 pulley.




So moving to the alu pulley was a weight reduction of around 60%, then modifications to the alu pulley dropped that down by about 22% - not bad. Totally not worth the effort from stock pulley I'm sure but it's so preeeeettty...


Proof is in the pudding as they say, and acceleration is happily ramped up with no motor stall :)

Lesson learned - watch your rotational mass, especially if it's placed on a fairly large diameter like a pulley!