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

[routercnc]

I can see the pictures

Nice work on the squaring and tramming.

[Zeeflyboy]

Charlie, if it's working for everyone else might just be that imgur was over capacity when you looked and the older pictures were cached... try clearing your cache and refresh.

Thought I'd experiment a little with the seals for the Z-axis. I have some red material on order so we can stick with the colour scheme but for now to dial it in I'm just using what I've got which is a nice orange!

So this is the part, I've designed it now so that it has a locking flange to prevent it from going walkies... it should just push into the top/bottom plates and wedge in place.






So off to the printer to try it out... I'm using a material called Cheetah by ninjaflex. It's a fairly firm but flexible rubbery material (shore hardness 95A) which is abrasion resistant, resistant to chemicals and pretty tough.








Here you can see the flexible rubbery nature:




Fit is excellent, but maybe just a smidge tight. I need to check it with the part actually held in the plates, but it may just need a very slightly enlargement of the interior cut out.

[charlieuk]

strange I just tried the other halfs mac and that is the same, I can still see all the new pictures in other threads though. o well I'm sure it looks great.

[routercnc]

Charlie:

How about this - the last photo showing the 3D printed part on the rail:


Zeeflyboy:
Great timing - I've been thinking about how to seal the rails on my Z axis. I've planned ahead and have tapped holes in the base of the Y axis to accept a plate with some sort of brush/seal, and I was playing with ideas for the actual seal. I was thinking about cutting them out of a small piece of plastic with the router, and inserting them into the plate, as you have done.
But 3D printing is a much better idea as you can get tight into the corners, cheers for that. Also by chance bumped into a colleague today with a 3D printer and he is now lined up ready to make me some parts. I just need a slot this week to get back onto the CAD and draft something up as a trial.
I think as you say it is a matter of fine tuning something to keep the worst out but not rub too much.

[charlieuk]

yes that shows up

[Zeeflyboy]

Really odd - I've been using imgur for all the photos so nothing has changed... I really can't think why it only affects you, and only for recent pics... how odd.

RouterCNC - I just printed one out which I enlarged the cut out by 0.15mm on and I think it's perfect. Given you are using 20mm rail too you are welcome to have my model to modify as needed to make the exterior fit your machine? You use fusion right?

If you need them printed out I can print them out and pop em in the post for you too if that helps. Flexibles can be a tricky thing to get right, some printers cope better than others (bowden types really don't tend to do great for example) and stuff like cheetah is pretty expensive to buy if he doesn't already have something comparable.

[routercnc]

The fusion file would be great. Maybe zip it up and attach it to a post in this thread ?

Thanks for the offer to make some parts - he's been printing all sorts for ages plus has a CNC machine so I'll give him a go at making something. Thanks again