Polymorph Carriage and Clips

Ash and myself have assembled our first rod-based slide, using the Polymorph saddles described earlier. I've also made a set of unsplit Polymorph clamps to hold the rails, held in place with Meccano screws (dunno what they are, but they're close to M4). We'll see if they need grub screws later - they're easy to melt in with a soldering iron and tweezers. Meccano came to the party and donated a Centenial Crane Kit to the cause; though it had no gears in it there were plenty of long Meccano bolts and little pulleys.

A two-part Polymorph clamp is used to hold the drive belt to the carriage without damaging it, and the clamp is attached to one of the first FDM brackets Adrian made for me. The 150g assembly can be seen here, dragging an additional 800g:



With an additional 900g payload, the drive belt starts to slip occasionally. So we can set our rough estimate for the maximum mass of the carriage assembly as 1050g. I'll whack off 250g for errors and safety margins for the moment, and figure on a total carriage mass of 800g.

This carriage, when fitted with a turntable, looks like weighing about 750g. This only leaves 50g for the payload - our extruded artifact. But Meccano is a lot heavier than Polymorph, so we'll see how we go with the gradual replacement of parts. Besides, 50g of Polymorph actually goes quite a long way.

The switch on the side of the carriage is for later trials. We're going to see if we can get it shooting back and forth at maximum speed, and then we'll see if anything warms up or falls off.

Vik :v) & 4sh