Arch Grant, Round Two!

I was accepted to the second round of the Arch Grant entrepreneur and startup grant on March 10th and the submission for the second round was on the 17th. I submitted my pitch video and here it is!









I will be continuing to update the blog as the design progresses. I am currently playing with a few different designs for the Z axis, which is why I haven't posted anything recently.



More posts on the big machine to come! Keep watching!

Gantry Design DONE!

After several revisions and different models the Gantry parts are done being designed.

Naturally they will change slightly and go through revisions as the parts go from digital to reality but for now they can all be printed and tested! One revision that will be done before moving onto the next piece in my design list is changing out the Dual V Wheels with Solid V Wheels. The Solid V Wheels can handle the loads of the gantry better than the Dual V's so they will be an easy replacement. The Solid V's are a slightly smaller diameter (very very slight) but its enough that I want to make sure that I don't have to change the placement of the mounting holes.

Here is are a few pics of the gantry so far.

And here are the individual parts. The first of them is the Extruder_Plate. Just like the name says, the extruder will be mounted to this plate.

The next part is the Ganty_Mount bracket. I went through 5 revisions of this part before finally ending up with this design. Each revision was a ground up take on the design which took a while each time. On the back side of the bracket there are little "wings" or "horns". Those are going to be the points that the belts mount to allowing the gantry to move.

Next up on the design list is the Z axis scissor lift. This one will be an interesting challenge. In some of my pre-drafting spitball designs I came up with about 16 different parts that I will need to model for it. Many of those are used multiple times which means that the total part count is closer to around 50 parts in the the Z axis assembly. That count doesn't even include the wheels or screws! Looks like I have quite a bit to be working on, so best get to it!

Comments? Questions? Answers?

Just post in the comments section below!

Still Working On Things

The most up to date version of the El Monstro's design is coming along. I am having some issues getting the gantry redesigned to support two pieces of extruded aluminum to help with the deflection of the full 1500mm distance. I have some designs that I am working on currently but they are still in the early stages of design.

Here are a few pics of the frame so far using the new corner blocks. In all there are 3 different corner blocks used in the frame. The Base, which covers the 4 bottom corners and vertical rails. The Motor Mount corner  blocks, which are at the top of the machine holding the motors in place. Finally the Idler Mount's which allow the idler pulleys to be mounted so that the belts can loop back to the driving stepper motors.

A close up view of one of the corner blocks shows a high lighted hole at the bottom of the corner block. This corner bottom hole is used to attach tension cables to in order to allow a stronger structure without the need for an external super structure.

More updates to follow as I make progress on the design!