Frame and a few fixes

Quite a long post today, as I had a fair bit of fixing to do. A few people pointed out that my x-axis wasn't quite right, it turned out I had put the carriage on upside-down. Luckily it was just a case of loosening a few bolts, taking off one end and the carriage and putting them back on the right way round! Here is how it looks now, carriage on the top and x-axis stepper pointing down. 

I also tightened the belt, I had left it loose when test fitting it and forgot to tighten it! Once that was done it was on to fix number 2 or 3 or 4 or something. One of the RP parts that holds one of the bearings for the z-axis was missing some holes, here is the part.

No idea why the holes are missing, it doesn't look like it failed print the holes properly just like it never tried, so never mind. Simple to fix though, pop it into a vice with the other RP clamp part as a guide.

20 seconds of drilling later, and its all fixed.


Now that's done, I can get cracking with the frame. All the nuts are finger tight at the moment as I will check distances/measurements once the frame is in one piece.

Here is the other half of the frame complete, just need to bolt them together now. I did have a bit of trouble getting the threaded rods through some of RP parts, but again it wasn't a big deal I just cleaned up the insides of the holes a bit with a file.

Bolting the two halves together was relatively pain free, the bearing assemblies for the y-axis belt are just loose fitted in the picture below as I hadn't broken out the ruler yet.

Just enough time to finish the frame off by adding the last two threaded rods. And all done, still need to check measurements, but that's for another day.

Here is my jig-stick :) made from a few bits of steel stuck together. I turned the ends down on a lathe to within about 1/10th of a mm of the jig lengths on the reprap wiki so it should be ok.

Finally a shot of my work-area (my carpet), as you can see I'm a tidy person.

And there you have it, I'm getting close to the end of the mechanical build. Now I need to fit the y-axis, attach the x-axis and z-axis, thread belts on and I should be very close to being done.