Monday, August 25, 2025
Preliminary Testing - And Full 1 Dimension Constraint!
OK, so I broke the first pantograph flexure. Fortunately I printed another one overnight.
Slight change to the model - I got the centre lugs slightly mis-spaced for Metriccano holes. Fixing that. Also because I fragged a flexure because it was hard to poke the nuts in under the flexures, I'm extending the mounting brackets.
The +/- 8mm range of movement doesn't cause any collisions, but there is a fair bit of flexibility in the beams that allows some torsion if they're driven off-centre. Shorter, thicker beams might be needed.
Another change I might make is to stagger the anchors the other way, which would allow the drive screw to travel between the gap in the flexures. At the moment, if I tried that, the drive screw would have to poke through a beam. Damn.
One thing I realised is that if you put two of these flexures back-to-back, they form a very stable one dimensional linear reduction flexure. It's bulky, but might be useful.
