It's begun....

[Washout]

Another pic showing the beginnings of the Z axis.

I must be doing at least something right here as it moves nice and freely on its Y axis rails (as my crushed finger will attest to when I tilted it to put it back on the bed ;-) ).

Also I guess I should relate some areas of "interest" (read frustration) getting this far:

Firstly I had a problem with the profile from metallin having a slight ridge along the centre "flat area" on the 60x60 profile. This combined with Chai using hex machine head screws meant the rails would not sit flat to the profile bars but instead rocked side to side. This was easily fixed with replacment button head screws, which are lower profile and therefore the ridge in the profile can sit inside the rail supports and they can lie flat. Mine were very tight, but didn't have the stripped threads I see in another build log....probably air tools or something used to screw them in with too much torque.

Secondly screwing the extrusion together can be a pain, but I found that using a couple of turns on each screw using a similar pattern familiar to anyone who has torqued a cylinder head down seems to work well and almost pulls the extrusion into alignment itself (provided its cut at a nice right angle, which I'm using a TCT bosch blade in a chop saw for).

Thirdly I highly recommend a spiral flute tap (I think that's the correct name) for tapping the aluminium. The alloy for the extrusions seems to be stickier than most and was clogging up my normal taps after only a few turns. Even backing out to break the "chip" after every 1/4 or 1/2 turn didn't seem to help on my normal taps. IIRC I got the spiral flute tap from Arc Euro trade (is that John S's company?) - highly recommended and I'll be ordering more goodies from there in the future.

Of course there is much more to do, but it is nice to have a moving part operating correctly on the machine.

My ali plate also arrived today from Aluminium Warehouse (thanks for the link Jonathan), so I can get on with making the mounting plates to fix the X Axis bearing blocks to the gantry.

I am also having to do an on the fly redesign of the z axis, as the 120mm extrusion is not going to be wide enough for the two supported rails and ballscrew mount etc. Luckily I ordered a 1000x500x15mm ali plate so I have at least got plenty of material to make a wide version from.

More as I progress......

Cheers


Chris