Monday, March 3, 2014

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!

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