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

[Zeeflyboy]

Both very nice machines! No size envy here....

Were the frames DIY?

Yeah that was me - it was the vortex race drone that I was designing back then.

[njhussey]

Both very nice machines! No size envy here....

Were the frames DIY?

Yeah that was me - it was the vortex race drone that I was designing back then.

Ahh thought it was, I remember your fpv Eurofighter too...fantastic plane.

Yes, both were welded from scratch. Mine's now vertically mounted (well 85° to be precise) on another frame I welded up...

Sent from my HUAWEI VNS-L31 using Tapatalk

[Zeeflyboy]

I should learn to weld one day...


Cheers chaps - I'm off to scratch my head and think what I can do with the bed/frame design.

[Zeeflyboy]

Well I've been playing around with it, and unfortunately I'm just not going to be able to get the work size I want to work in the space I need if going with the raised gantry type design, at the moment the work area is more important to me than absolute rigidity.

That said, taking on board that feedback I will be tweaking the design a little to take the 15mm mounting plates higher up (thus making the gantry arms effectively 40mm thick until they leave the bed surface) and I can also move the gantry down by about 14mm and make it line up with the bottom of the z-axis without losing any clearance... I can also switch from 20mm plate to 15mm plate for the main bed which would allow me to drop another 5mm off the gantry height. All adds up!

Given that the current machine does a pretty decent job of aluminium already, I hope that the re-designed Z-axis and the significantly beefier gantry arms (current ones are 150mm wide and 15mm thick vs the new one at 250mm wide and 25mm thick will be more than sufficient for my needs while giving the larger work area I need.

[njhussey]

Just looking back again at your design, why the 2 rails each side of your Y axis? One rail will have more than sufficient strength for anything you can throw at it?

[Zeeflyboy]

Overkill?

[Zeeflyboy]

Been re-working the gantry a touch...

Its now a 40x200mm ITM profile vs the 160mm before... in addition to that, I reasoned that given that I was having to put 20mm spacers on the carriages to bring them in line with the ballscrew block, I may as well put that material into the gantry strength instead and raise the rails themselves out by 20mm... to that end I've designed a 20mm thick plate that will be mounted to the profile, then the rails will attach to the plate... the centre will be machined out to accommodate the motor mount and ballscrew bearing block.

The back is 12mm plate, and the top and bottom covers I figure may as well be made structural, so they are now mostly comprised of 4mm plate and will be screwed into the profile top/bottom, which I figure should help a little to reduce any deflection from forces in the Y-Axis.

Should be fairly strong?