Desktop beast

[RobC]

Made quite significant progress this week with machining more components.

Both gantry sides are mostly complete, each has chamfer ops on the rear side so they will be flipped and located into a jig from the negative shape of them for ease of locating.




The spacer blocks are all finished, these extend out from the carriages to clear the frame and also act as a method for the gantry to be trammed so they are independent, on the other side of the spacer blocks are the ballscrew mounts which you can see have bolts at the bottom of the spacer.


The mechanism of the cam you can see here, an offset of 0.5mm when rotated 180 degrees gives me around 2-3 mm of travel at the top of the gantry so there is plenty there with very fine adjustment capability.


The final top plate where the motor mount is to be bolted and also yet machined is completed minus the rear operations to create the counterbores and chamfers.


A few design changes also, mostly to break up the horrible flat surfaces on the end pieces with a more showing off textural look to them. These will be pocket cut to ensure there is some lovely helical tool marks that are consistent instead of adaptive where you will otherwise lose them as it drags the tool back over.



The bed has arrived thanks to Metalex and Alimex, a superb company if you haven't already dealt with them as they sorted out a damaged delivery no problem and had a new one out on delivery within a few days. They are also significantly cheaper than a certain warehouse.