MakiBox A6 Update - XY Mechanism Iteration
2022-02-05 16:45 by Jonathan Buford (comments: 0)
MakiBox A6 Update - XY Mechanism Iteration
When I got the current design of the XY mechanism together, I noticed that there was a little bit of stuttering going on with the right hand side of the bearings for the Y axis movement. It is not entirely unexpected, but I was hoping that the mechanism would be small enough and rigid enough to not run into this.
I've come up with a few options of the next iteration I will be doing after wrapping up this current prototype, and already made a test change on the existing prototype to test out one of them:
1. Remove the bearing on the non-driven end and support it with a rod to take the load without much friction:
2. Add in an axle that keeps the sides in sync. This would work since it would take very small amounts of force to overcome the sticking that is causing the stuttering. This direction will take longer to make a prototype of, so I'm leaving it to the next iteration, but the upside is that it would solve the problem when creating a larger design. Also the same idea could be used on setups like a RepRap to eliminate the cost and complexity of running two steppers in parallel.
I'll finish with this version of the prototype, including the extruder build before making any other changes to the XY mechanism at this point. The first solution seems to be good, and I'm planning on testing a setup with two smaller parallel rods per each axis along with oiled bronze bearings as the next iteration. This would be more rigid and would have a nice side effect of making a symmetric output head with the extruder, router, laser head supported on two sides in both the X and Y axis.
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Comment
An axle or belt (like the RepRap Huxley's Z axis) to drive the other end would be ideal, but that's going to add cost and complexity.