Tool Carrier

posted 17 Oct 2013 23:09 by David Taylor

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I spent a bit of time designing a tool carrier. I.E. the hot-end carrier. I've seen loads of these printed, but I'm trying to keep the printed parts on my printer to a minimum until I actually have a 3D printer. All the guys I do know with 3D printers are just too busy so I spend allot of time having to wait for them, not to mention any rework required if a design was wrong.   I figured if I made one from aluminium, I could make this with a bit of work at home. For the fun of it, I decided to get a quote to have the parts laser cut and was pleasantly surprised: To have the carrier cut from 3mm aluminium and 3 clamps cut from 4.5mm aluminium (See pictures below) would cost me a grand total of R 26.16 (1.65GBP or 2.66USD). I was shocked. I thought it would be at least 2 extra zeros to that number. Needless to say, I'm not going to make them manually.   4.5mm is however not the required 4.6mm I need to hold a hot-end securely (http://reprap.org/wiki/File:Jhn_nozzle_holder_v5_metric.jpg) so I decided to see what it would cost to have a slightly better version CNC'ed. This would allow me to cut the clamps from 6mm aluminium and then have a perfect 4.6mm height machined out. I'm still waiting for quotes from two local companies that I've asked. (I hate the fact that South African companies do not deal well with e-mail. Unless you phone them, you never get anything out of them)   Anyway, below are some pictures of the designs done in OpenSCAD