Hi Freerider,
very impressive work, I can only guess that you pretty much intimidated most of the folks around here with the results you got with the new belt driven z-axis you came up with.
Perhaps that's why everyone is speechless and nobody has posted a reply yet, lol.
To be able to cut a PCB of that quality (all hats off, seriously) with a stick of wood as the core of your z-axis blows my mind too.
As you know, I've messed with the carriage design too, but what you've come up with and the simplicity of the mod is very cool, awesome job... :-)
The part I don't quite get is why you went through all this trouble with the belt drive.
I mean, you could have just asked one of us to get you the fairly low cost screw (most of us have a large cut-off piece of the screw sitting somewhere in the garage) along with the backlash nuts instead of this.
Don't take this the wrong way, you must have had your reasons and it came out pretty darn awesome, but the original design is pretty darn solid too and works very well.
For myself to attest, the one sided screw with the thrust bearing design has not caused any trouble so far and has been repeatably accurate to the thou without any issues in my machine.
I've done 100's of complicated carvings by now, some taxing the z-axis for several hours, I can't get it to fail or backlash in any way.
I've also cut PCB's too and know what happens if there's just a minute amount of backlash in the Z, so I get your point.
The original design has none, so I still don't get it - unless there was no way to get the parts for you.
In the end, it's just what you need it to do I guess. :-)
Awesome work once again and impressive video editing by the way ;-) I wish I could do that properly yet, lol.
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Mac