Dorsal, your set up looks sweet. I especially like the LED lights reflecting off the plastic sheet and the white surfaces, it looks very HAL like! The wiper brush looks like a cheap and effective way to keep the acme threads clean.

 

It took me a while to understand what you meant. No (kinda). I ordered my Smoothstepper with a DB25-to-DB26 ribbon cable, so I could connect it to the Easy-CNC board. It was a ribbon cable until I realized I needed something a lot more flexible, so I sat down for an hour and carefully "zipped" the center portion of each wire of the ribbon apart from the rest, until I had cable that was "ribbon" at each end and just loose wires between. Then I twisted one connector through the middle of all the wires, twice, to make 2 parallel, twisted bundles of wires. After I connected the cable between the teo controller boards, I made a loop of those twisted bundles and tied them together with the braided, waxed cotton twine. It really takes nearly as long to describe it as it did to make that little mod, but at least I didn't have to buy the wire and connectors and make the complete setup.

 

Thanks for the compliments Randy, but maybe I'll have to give mine a sexy paint job also, to make it look as great as yours.
I believe my machine is set at X=60, Y=45, Z=30
One of the bugs about installing the SmoothStepper is the up / down arrow keys don't work when you are in the "Motor Tuning" screen. That means you have to set a speed and acceleration for one (or all) axes, then save the settings and exit the "Motor Tuning" screen, then try the new settings out using the up/down/left/right and page up / page down keys. In other words, I cannot do the same kind of "real-time" adjustments the rest of you can. Since I am more lazy than most men, I have tried to set speeds in 5 IPM increments, and these numbers work well right now. Maybe after I have run the machine for a while, my HDPE thrust nuts will break-in some more and I'll bump the speed up later.

 

Randy, my accelerations are around 10 on both Y and Z. I'll have to wait 'till I'm home to look at the actual settings, but since one hard-drive decided to crash on my desktop last night, I might be a little busy kick-starting that Q@#$%@$%@# machine back into existence. :evil:

 

Hahahaha Mark, I didn't know there was a competition! Besides that, I'm an Engineer and our motto is, "If it isn't broke, fix it 'til it is!"
Randy, acceleration on X is at 20, Y is at 8 and Z is at 8. It seems sort of logical, since the 3/8-12 screw is faster than a 1/4-20, the acceleration should be slower, because the stepper still only has a limited amount of torque. It's like starting off in second gear - acceleration will logically be slower or you'll stall your car's motor.

 

Just an fyi for anyone considering the purchase of a SmoothStepper - When I visited the home page at http://www.warp9td.com/ , they said the waiting list had been reduced to 2 DAYS long!

 

Hey! Look what I found! http://www.oznium.com/led-ropelight
For about $25 you can get 1 meter of rope light, trim it to length, cap off the end, plug in the cord and Voila! A lighted gantry path! Make it red to keep the tourist's attention.

Yeah, I could buy them myself, assemble them and sell to you guys at a markup, but "that just ain't right!"

 

I've found others cheaper, but it's the brightness that counts here. Even the red rope has 550mcd LEDs, and the white rope has 1800mcd LEDs - what about your source?
Oh, did you notice the source I linked to was plug-n-play for 120vAC?

 

Here are some photos of my Z-Axis mod, with the 3/8-12 Acme screw and homemade ZBN. It is attached under the plate where the original metal t-nut was attached.

This way, all the forces against the ZBN are pushing it against the plate. The screws are on top, so they only support the weight of the ZBN.


The 5 extra holes in the top of the gantry are as follows: The center hole is so I can access the slot that I cut in the end of my Acme screw, so I can turn the Acme screw when I get the gantry jammed up against the bottom plate.

The 4 outer ones allow me to loosen / adjust / tighten the screws that are holding my ZBN, with a long screwdriver. The screws go through oversized holes in the MDF and are tapped / threaded directly into the ZBN. So, I assembled the gantry with the screws a little loose, then snugged them afterwards, when the ZBN had self-aligned. Yeah, there are probably a lot more elegant ways to do that, but I couldn't think of any at the time.

Oh, the 4 bigger and 2 smaller screws are holding the gantry-top down. I'm learning to hate glue - the bad stuff works too good and the good stuff doesn't work when you want it to!

Yeah, I know the pictures are fuzzy.
(That's really so you can't tell how un-elegant my ZBN is.) Attached files

 

Randy, that was mostly because I really buggered the central area getting my t-nut removed. The large chunk of HDPE made it simple to move the screws outward from the mess.

 

Thanks Mark - I made this post to fill-in the fact I'd never posted photos of my Z-Acme drive.

 

About fifteen years ago I was the electrical contractor on a job where a space was converted into a restaurant. They had made a counter top made out of cutting board. It was a sheet of 4x8x3/4. They had to cut out the sink and I thought that the cutout piece could come handy one day.

After reading the posts at the middle of this thread I thought that it will be LDPE. Today I put it in the lathe and lo and behold, IT CHIPPED. That stuff turned out to be HDPE!!! That piece that I took is 11.5x13. Enough to make lots and lots of nuts. Now all I have to do is cut a small piece out of the 1/2" all-thread and make a tap out of it.

Yoram

 

Mark, what I actually used was this flex-coupler from McMaster-Carr (clickable image), but I bored one end to fit the 3/8" rod. I could have ordered the one listed below it, already bored to size, but the one that's 1/4 X 3/8 is also 3/8" longer, and I was concerned about the amount of space available. With that thick block of HDPE, I think the longer coupler would have fit okay anyway, now that I've assembled it.

Yoram - Nice grab!