Drawer slide design

[Hobbiest]

I have been tossing the though of some kind of cover for the ways, and haven't thought of too much. Any ideas for really low cost stuff? Bout my only ideas are trying to find some kind of bellows on something else.z axis is a total stumper, as there is so little space in there, course because there is so little space, it may not be too much of a problem. Better hook up a vac!

[phillby]

Maybe this post could help in covering the ways

http://www.cnczone.com/forums/showth...hlight=origami

I hope it helps

[crakdOS]

I built this machine last weekend before I left for school. I needed something to play with when I am supposed to be studying.

I used three drawer slides for the X axis and Y axis and only 2 for the Z.
One drawer slide is oriented 90 degrees from the others. This works fairly well.

[mikeschn]

Nice job on the drawer slide machine.

Mike...

[Ingchao]

Originally Posted by crakdOS I built this machine last weekend before I left for school. I needed something to play with when I am supposed to be studying. I used three drawer slides for the X axis and Y axis and only 2 for the Z. One drawer slide is oriented 90 degrees from the others. This works fairly well.

Nice Job!
I'm currently working on one myself. I'm having a little problem with designing my z-axis.
Can you post more pics of your z-axis?
Thanks.

[crakdOS]

Here are some more pictures of the z axis. I only used 2 drawer slides and it works pretty well, but I think 3 would work even better.

View of the right side

View of the left side

View of the back

View of the top

[Ingchao]

Thanks for the pics!

I pretty much did mine the same way, but I'm hoping to put my lead screw between the slides. I'll let you know how it works out.

[roll_tide]

i was actually thinking about making a small router out of heavy duty full extention draw slides because i have access to an unlimited amount of them for free at work. as well as mdf, router bits, and just about any kind of fastener you could imagine.. i work at a company that distributes parts to cabinet shops.. so i was wondering if anyone perfected their design yet.. because it would be of absolutely no cost to me for the table itself. the only thing that would cost me is the motors and controllers.

[cogoman]

Perhaps the motors and controller can be free also, if you don't need a lot of torque or speed. Most printers, especially HP have 2 steppers and drivers on board. I've taken two older ones (still had a centronics port) and cut the CPU out of the loop. Get the data sheet from the driver IC. The ones I have use PHASE-a PHASE-b drive, which EMC2 can handle. I just set the current control leads to 75% current (approx). You will only get full step out of the older ICs, but 200 steps per revolution x 20 threads per inch gets you 250 millionths of an inch increments. A bigger 10 thread per inch screw still has 1/2 thousandth resolution, much better than a drawer slide can hold.

A recommendation, keep the driver board, the power supply board, and the base plate from the printer. I'm using a 12 volt computer power supply and the steppers move much slower.

1. cut the lands from the microprocessor to the stepper chips.
2. cut the lands from the centronics connector to the microprocessor.
3. splice a white wire change from the centronics connector to the appropriate pins on the stepper controller chip.
4. use a standard configuration from EMC2 to a 3-axis stepper system, but change the mode from step/direction to the first phase-a phase-b configuration. If you can't figure out how, EMC-users forum can help.

Hopefully someone can use this even if you can't.