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

[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.

[routercnc]

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 (!)

[Zeeflyboy]

Technically its the wife's ;)

You are assuming I ever finish... seems along way away. Fun journey though!

I've been busy anodising some the Z-axis parts... all that's left to do are the big front plate and the side plates (for which I need to cook up a clever way of holding them in the tub).


Top and bottom plate:






Here's my Dye tub (30L) and immersion heater with thermostat




And my big steel hotpot that fits most stuff for sealing:




Largest part so far - the back plate. This one ran at 10 amps and is the first time I've actually observed the anodising bath increase in temp during a run. Only by a degree or so but noticeable.






Too big for my hot pot, so I found a steel ash container and sealed it with silicon to make it watertight.




Final parts after a quick light buff with some automotive polish that helps remove some the haze I'm getting on the surface after sealing with the nickel acetate:





Hope to get the last few bits done in the next few days and then I can assemble and see how it looks. Might do a touch more laser etching too because it's addictive....

[AlexDoran]

Looking great as usual

[Zeeflyboy]

Good to know - thanks for the info!

So I needed to make a little doo-hickey out of titanium to allow me to rack the side panels (note, titanium screws too!)






Parts degreased and after a quick etch and Desmut:




Dyed and laser etched... I did two different etches here, the honeycomb was at a higher speed and lower power which has given it a nice grey effect that looks better in real life than on the camera. Was a bit worried after doing this that it was too bold and in your face, but having assembled it I really like the look as part of the overall assembly.




That done, I put together the bulk of the Z-axis after the anodising. Only the big front plate left to do but I need to figure out how I'm going to seal it as the only suitably large vessel I have to boil it in is a 60L drum which will take a loooong time to get to the boil with a 1.5kw heater.

[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!

[Zeeflyboy]

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.