Sieg X1. Now with extra brurp brurp burrzzzzzup!

[ecat]

Few more pics:

I started with the X axis, the screw is held by 2 skate bearings with pockets both sides. The inner bearing pocket, under the table of course, is full depth which left me with a lot of 'spare' to cover on the existing screw rod - hence the excessive number of washers . My first ever bearing pockets and my first ever play with a boring head/bar The motor plate is made from 3mm sheet cut from a standard 2U type rack mount front panel. Could do with a couple of mm off the length of the rods!

There is a little sprig of metal left on the cut out for the motor. I left it there ar a reminder that it take it more than a couple of bearings and a bolt to make a rotary table - whoops, as by largest cutter is 12mm and the required hole is 38mm it seemed like a good idea at the time!



Next up was the Z. Just a couple of thrust bearings, top one in a 1mm pocket. I chose to skip the skimming of the aluminium bar, probably not the right thing to do but it worked out ok. The shims, 3x coke can, were not needed to fit, but adding them gave a better balance wrt the head binding at full top and full bottom. This may be a useful thing to try on the stock machine.

I must say, hacking out the big recess for the column was great fun, the little X1 surprised me with its willingness.



Thinking about bearings, I decided thrust bearings would be ok for the Y. Much the same construction as the X, but I don't know quite what I was thinking when I measured this out, I need to trim quite a big bit off those rods! I also need to find my needle files, those 4mm holes for the M4 screws are not quite right, The 38mm recess on the plate for the Nema23 motor mount is perfect :dance:



Drivers on hard board, lol



And a money shot, I'll try for a better one later



Part of the EMC2 - not designed for actual cutting - test logo, cut in 1 pass 0.25mm with a 3mm bit.

The edges are nice, but I did need to give a quick surface wipe with fine wet and dry.

Hard to see in the pic, but there is some chatter, I guess you call it, on the bottom of most cuts.

There's a circular mark at the entry/exit point of all cuts, is my head dipping?

The circle between the 2 and the 4 is almost perfect. All this was done without any gib adjustment from the manual setup and no backlash comp. applied. I'll work on that later.

So, a great fun project. I'd certainly recommend adding bearings to even a manual machine, once I snugged them up a little I removed something like 90% of the original backlash.

Also of note, I have not cut or drilled any of the original machine or parts - though this may change when I fit limit switches. It can all be put back to the original configuration with about 10 minutes work.

Of Limit switches: I worked for quite a while with a motorised Z axis, the saving in endless hand cranking was too good an opportunity to miss. This highlighted a major problem with gib locking, if you forget the lock is on you screw the drive screw right out of the coupling. I'm trying to come up with some sort of switch arrangement triggered when using the gib lock, for now I'll make do with a BIG sign.

I'll add some more pics if I ever get around to tidying things up.