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

**Zeeflyboy** · 08-10-2018

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** · 08-10-2018

Ferrari red! : )

**AlexDoran** · 18-10-2018

Fantastic

**Zeeflyboy** · 21-10-2018

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** · 22-10-2018

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** · 22-10-2018

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.

**routercnc** · 22-10-2018

I forgot you were that tooled up!

I wondered how you got such crisp edges and maybe the anodising was helping but laser makes sense now.

Don’t forget to make something on the new machine and not just more parts for it (!)

**Tom J** · 21-11-2018

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

**Zeeflyboy** · 26-11-2018

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!

**Zeeflyboy** · 26-11-2018

Also made a start on the X-axis, you may recall these belt guides... decided to get them done and out the way so I can do a proof of concept test before making a mess of expensive extrusions.

12mm plate secured down

Top side finished:

Second operation:

Third:

Racked up and getting a healthy dose of science

I cut some steel rod to length for the roller shafts and then needed to make the rollers themselves on the lathe... for this I've used some PTFE rod as it should remain maintenance free for a long time.

All finished and fitted, rods retained with a little loctite.