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

[A_Camera]

Very nice place, but of course, I am not surprised to see that you man cave looks this nice and tidy. Thanks for sharing the images.

Otherwise I agree, moving heavy objects is just an engineering question but it is good to consider it in advance.

[Zeeflyboy]

Thanks

Yeah you might have saved me some grief by making me think about hoist points early on!

[Zeeflyboy]

Slight tangent again but I just wanted to share this beautiful bit of kit that just landed on my doorstep...

I've been quite excited waiting for this to arrive:




It's a 3D touch probe called the TPA2 by Kurokesu... absolute piece of art! It's filled with di-electric oil (de-oxit I'm guessing) to prevent oxidation of the Tungsten carbide contacts which should keep it working reliably for a long time!

Looking forward to getting this up and running, if it works half as good as it looks it should bring a new level of accuracy to my work. I was waiting for this before kicking off any machining for "El Beast" so that I can use it to verify dimensions and for accurate two sided machining.


edit - got the concentricity at the tip dialled in to a consistent +/- 0.002mm so 0.004mm total.... just pushing hard on the spindle causes more variation than that on this machine so I think that is good enough for now!

[A_Camera]

Thanks

Yeah you might have saved me some grief by making me think about hoist points early on!

Sorry.

[Zeeflyboy]

Wheels are in motion... Rails/carriages/screws/accessories have been quoted and paid for, and I've managed to get the milled bottom frame extrusions ordered too. I am having some 1204 screws ground for a different project which will unfortunately mean around 20 days lead time on the motion components, but this isn't going to be a quick build anyway as I'm going to be held back by only budgeting a small amount each month towards it's completion.

Looking forward to be able to get started on some of it. Plan is to build the bottom frame first as I have enough 20mm eco-cast in stock to get cracking and the extrusions should arrive middle of the month. It'll also be good to get that built first to make sure I don't have any alignment issues with the design, if I end up having to change how it's oriented then better to get that nailed first then figure out the changes that the X-gantry would require as a result.

[njhussey]

Looking forward to the build....

[Zeeflyboy]

So I've just got my hands on the extrusions...





Packaging looked okay but alas they weren't quite as well protected as one might hope - upon inspection one of the large extrusions has clearly suffered a drop on one corner.




Cleaned up with a file and it shouldn't have any impact on the final result.




To do a quick and easy check of comparative length I placed the extrusions on a piece of alucast plate and put them side by side. Given that a fingertip can detect features in the 10 micron range through dynamic touch (i.e. dragging your finger across a feature) this is actually a surprisingly accurate method of determining if there is any difference in length.






The good news is that they seem to be completely flush and more-over standing them side by side you can't even see a hint of daylight between the two, so they must be nice and straight as well.

Did the same for the smaller cross-extrusions where it's arguably much more important that they are of consistent length and the initial check seems good too. As these are shorter than the main extrusions they should be within my ability to measure using the CNC machine and a touch probe, so should be able to get some more scientific results!




Interesting to see the difference between the milled sides and the un-molested sides - you can see the gaps between the non-milled edges where they aren't flush (the edge that runs horizontal left-right in the pic)




Quick layout to see the size:




Next month's budget will go on some alu plate and some thorlabs precision corner brackets (well, and a big bbq for a new built in project I'm doing in the garden!) , and then the build of the y-axis can properly begin, hopefully with the motion components arriving some time next month too. Apart from the unfortunate corner ding, I'm very impressed with the quality. They are some seriously chunky and solid feeling hunks of alu too which is reassuring.

[A_Camera]

Nice, thank you. Care to share the supplier and the data? Maybe next time I'll buy these, since these look MUCH better than mine.

About the dent... you should complain. I received once also one with a dent, complained and without further discussion they sent me a new piece. Yes, it is just aesthetics, but it is a pity to have spend so much time and money on perfection and on something which (especially in your case) is otherwise so nicely designed and built and start off with a dent...