Monday, August 04, 2025
Symmetrical Pantograph - Don't Cross The Beams
The problem with the previous reducing pantograph design was that it is damned hard to print as some of the beams cross over each other. It occurred to me that by making the design symmetrical it could be made fully constrained to 1DoF without "crossing the beams."
True, it makes it much larger - in a practical version the main beams would be around 100mm long. But this would still fit on a standard Prusa Mk3 bed.
Again, a parallel linear flexure (not shown) would be needed to fully constrain the driven end. I'll play around and see what the flex angles are and what we can get away with to form a 10mm working area using a reduction of 2.5:1 - shorter beams mean less unwanted flexing in the mechanism
Oh, and if we move the anchored block (on the green line) up and down the Y axis, we can uniformly displace on that too.
