Wednesday, June 14, 2006
Fine tuning Godzilla...
As parts have worn in Godzilla is translating more and more smoothly. The big plus is that the Frankenmotors draw much less current now, I'm suspecting less than 4 amps on the basis that the motor housings no longer warm more than a very few degrees over air temperature.
I had a clatter and some bumpy movement in the powered y-axis tower. Today I broke it down and discovered that the coupling nut in the thrust collar was a bit lose in its housing and slipping occasionally, which was what was causing the clatter. Wrapping the coupling nut in a bit of duct tape smoothed that right out.
The translation of the extruder platform on the x-axis has smoothed out but oddly still doesn't go any faster than it did before.
Duct tape has proved more than adequate to connect the Frankenmotors and the threaded drive shafts.
It took a while to get the balance between cable tension in the force transfer system between the two z-axis modules and added load on the Frankenmotor driving the stage. When I first set the z-axis stage cabling up I was getting about 0.7 mm of wag between the powered and cable-driven halves of the stage. I wasn't particularly worried about that in that the wag was very predictable and could have been numerically accounted for in a calibration routine. Today, however, now that the z-axis has worn in I was able to safely increase the cable tension until the wag between modules was too small to measure with my calipers. Having no detectable wag makes life considerably easier.
I had a clatter and some bumpy movement in the powered y-axis tower. Today I broke it down and discovered that the coupling nut in the thrust collar was a bit lose in its housing and slipping occasionally, which was what was causing the clatter. Wrapping the coupling nut in a bit of duct tape smoothed that right out.
The translation of the extruder platform on the x-axis has smoothed out but oddly still doesn't go any faster than it did before.
Duct tape has proved more than adequate to connect the Frankenmotors and the threaded drive shafts.
It took a while to get the balance between cable tension in the force transfer system between the two z-axis modules and added load on the Frankenmotor driving the stage. When I first set the z-axis stage cabling up I was getting about 0.7 mm of wag between the powered and cable-driven halves of the stage. I wasn't particularly worried about that in that the wag was very predictable and could have been numerically accounted for in a calibration routine. Today, however, now that the z-axis has worn in I was able to safely increase the cable tension until the wag between modules was too small to measure with my calipers. Having no detectable wag makes life considerably easier.
