Joe's 1000x600x200 steel and aluminium router started

[devmonkey]

Finished making the last set of plates, these are for the X and Y axis, ballscrew mounting. Hopefully this is the last of the aluminium work on the manual mill. I still need to make some stepper mounting plates but leaning towards doing those in 3mm steel.The white parts are 3D printed standoffs for the X axis ballnut holders, I didn't have any large enough ally stock so we will have to see how they fare. They get clamped between two aluminium lumps so should be ok, if not will replace when I have some bar stock.

[devmonkey]

Any they all fit:

[devmonkey]

Was still waiting for the pulleys this morning so decided to align the Z axis assembly and fit the ballscrew. I needed a 0.25mm/10thou shim between the ballnut holder and Z-plate, but it was extremely difficult to get the shim into place as the holder is buried between the rails inside the assembly. A bit of lateral thinking and I used some plastic lamination film cut from a normal A4 laminating pouch.

This stuff has the advantage of a) being quite hard after lamination,b) having a heat activated adhesive. So using an old iron I laminated 4 layers of the stuff onto the back of the ballnut holder, this formed the perfect shim. I trimmed it with a scalpel and cut the bolt holes. Worked really well. Z axis is now complete apart from lubrication points. These are a pain with the nipples supplied with the hiwin carriages and the ballscrew so will need some thinking.



Just as I finished the Z the delivery guy turned up with my belts and pulleys, so I spent a rather boring couple of hours, boring, reaming, cross drilling and tapping 8 steel pulleys. All done now. I only installed one M5 grub screw per pulley, each shaft will have a flat on it, hopefully this will be sufficient. I could do with some longer grub screws, or maybe just use an M5 bolt given the low RPMs.