New spindle is here and it looks great! Certainly much more proportional to the machine
Accessories to that are still in shipping but should come very soon.
Flexihal control board and some accessories to that also ordered, but that’s 1-2 weeks out until it arrives from Canada.
Before the electronics get here I want to be done with the ballscrews, mounting the spindle, and figure out what I’ll do for the enclosure. Also ideally have the new Z axis fully planned out, as there’s no better time to take stuff apart to measure than the time which would be downtime anyways.
Spent a few hours today on putting the machine into CAD so that I can start designing the new Z axis and the enclosure for the machine. Not done yet but making decent progress
Just finished reverse engineering the bulk of the machine in CAD. Still missing some details like the bellow attachment points and such but I’ll add that when I get to making new bellows. It’s detailed enough so that I can start designing the new Z axis.
Once that’s done and I know the total height of the machine I’ll spend a bit of time on the ATC upgrade just in CAD and then design the enclosure… I really should get to the enclosure soon though. I won’t cut anything until that’s around the machine. I need to keep it as compact as reasonable because it will take up a ton of space in my room, but also want to keep it compatible with all future upgrades, so I need to take a lot of things into consideration.
As is in the model I already fitted the new spindle to the old Z axis. The collet nut ends up 3mm lower than the lowest point of the mounting plate with the correct clamping position on the spindle which should definitely work for now. That also means I only need to drill 4 holes in the clamp and then I can mount it directly via the T slots on the front plate, so that’s very simple.
Added weight is around 140kg excluding spindle assuming all is steel but alu wouldn’t make much sense for this application
Not quite sure if this is the way I want to go. I dimensioned the Z for 275mm actual travel and 210mm part clearance. This makes it so that I can reach down to the table with a short tool while still leaving enough Z to work with longer tools. Definitely want that Z travel though and don’t see any other way… okay maybe the 3rd constraining linear guide on the X axis (at HGR45…) is designed a little overkill, but removing that I don’t think the 2x 25mm round rails would be able to keep up with the very significant size increase of the Z axis.
The biggest problem with wanting to go this way is purchasing well over 100kg of billet steel and machining it relatively accurately is… not something that the poor 2.2kw spindle I have now was designed to do.
Instead of the triple rail solution which is kind of hacky and hard to setup well, but once setup would be the great, I realized I could also just make a completely new backplate if I’m machining so much steel anyways. That’d allow the use of regular HGR profile rails all around on that axis, which would deal with the heavy Z better and I could avoid doing the 3 rail thing.
The best option I think is a new X backplate for just a single HGR35 rail and keeping the top rail with the triangular support
Some fine tuning of the model still remains, but I quite like the design where it is now. Don’t think my bank account is on the same page though! Total scope probably around 2.5k plus my suffering and time working with so much steel on a not suitable spindle.
What I need to buy for this conversion:
3x HGR35 rails, 1x HGR45 rail
8 carriages (150€ish each before tax)
one ballscrew w/ hardware
roughly 250kg steel plate as is
So I’m afraid this will take quite a bit of time to get done.
In other news the control board is just clearing customs so should arrive any day, will have to get started on wiring a bunch next week. Until then, I’d ideally finish the ballscrew swap, not sure if it will actually happen on time though.
Next up is a quick enclosure design with the now known total dimensions in mind (plus a bit of headroom), this shouldn’t be too hard.
The two sideplates there and the bolt on gusset on the back all serve the purpose of adding extra geometry to a flat plate to make it resist twist much much better. I could even add a front plate onto those to make it a box section around the spindle, will probably end up doing that from some thinner plate with my company logo on it (once i design the logo…). The mounting holes & bolts (& dowel pins whereever advised) are yet to be modelled.
Speaking of which, I’ll have so many holes to tap in steel during this project that I’m legitimately considering buying a tapping arm from china for about 400$ (+ tooling)
Been a little quiet the past months but finally the exam period is more or less over and I’ve more or less rested it off by now so I’m getting back to it.
I did get some stuff done in the meantime but still got some work to do. I swapped in the brand new ball screws for the X and Y axis and there’s zero backlash throughout the travel now, so that’s good news.
There were certainly some challenges along the way. I started with the X axis. Taking it apart was relatively straight forward, I used pipe wrench pliers to get the thrust bearings loosened, then put in the new ballscrew… Didn’t want to go in too much and then I realized I kinda messed up the needle roller bearing:
Tooling: collets, taps, various flat endmills, threadmills, ball nose endmills, chamfer mills, spot drills. Plus a single teeth fly cutter which I forgot to take a photo of, will be interesting to see if the current spindle has enough torque to work with that.
Plus I bought a tool length sensor. Still need to buy a probe though, likely going with this one:
I’ll be wiring up the electronics over the coming days and planning to order everything that’s still remaining asap. That includes the enclosure materials, all the raw aluminium needed for the raceboard chassis, the lasercut parts of the board, and the compressed air setup.
Also played a bit around in the CAM part of Fusion… I created the toolpaths for one of the simplest parts in 3 hours or so. Though that was figuring out CAM from scratch without much prior CAM knowledge so I guess that’s not too bad. Some tweaking is still left for when I want to actually cut this out.
I’m aiming for an early March finish of the raceboard chassis now.
assuming all is steel but alu wouldn’t make much sense for this application
