It's alive....

posted 1 Mar 2014 22:21 by David Taylor

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The little blob on the laft was my first attempt at printing a cube of 10x10x50mm. On the right was what I printed last night. Success.... finally. The previous two failed because the RAMPS 1.4 board was overheating even with what I thought was adequate cooling. After liberating a fan from an old dell workstation I had in the cupboard, all started working. That fan does create ALLOT of airflow though. Next steps are now to refine the process to improve print quality, but I can finally say I have a working Delta 3D printer. I'll post some videos of the event a bit later.

Thingiverse: Threaded Servo Pulley

posted 9 Oct 2013 01:01 by David Taylor

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I've uploaded another thing to Thingiverse: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:159208   This is a 25mm (working diameter) made to fit a Standard Nema 17 Stepper motor Shaft (5mm diameter with 4.5mm, 15mm long shaft cut-out). This pulley should line up perfectly with the 25mm idler pulley to allow for perfectly parallel strings either side of the toper. 11mm maximum lateral travel should be fairly easy to contain. The version I uploaded to Thingiverse was made for 0.8mm string/cable so it provides a bit more margin on the sides. As shown In the diagram above, the trucks will have a maximum vertical travel of 638mm which requires 8.12 revolutions to move the ruck through its full range. The hole for the nut to tie it to the shaft will have to be threaded though and should take M3 screws. OpenSCAD The other neat thing is that I initially drew the model in Sketchup. A friend of mine told me about OpenSCAD and after downloading it and familiarising myself for about 30 minutes, I was able to recreate the pulley in OpenSCAD. Awsome tool for parametric work. The OpenSCAD file is also available on thingiverse as part of the download. I'd love to hear your comments and feedback.

Thingiverse thing: 608 Idler Pulley with Stand

posted 9 Oct 2013 01:00 by David Taylor

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I published my first "thing" on thingiverse.com.   It is surprisingly hard to find small pulleys. The few you get do not have bearings, and are just to small.   a friend initially suggested that I could simply print these pulleys anyway. I then looked at using 105zz bearings but these are almost 7 times more expensive than 608zz bearings. In my original design I also needed 15 of them.   I bit of thinking and designing, I think I have simplified the overall design and cut the costs dramatically by designing a pulley that sits snugly over a standard 608zz bearing.       If you think you could use it, pop over to Thingiverse and print it. Don't forget to let me know what you think or suggest any improvements.