2024-04-23

Last modified: 2024-04-23 19:26:48

Machine building

Well I made a template, assembled it with threaded inserts, and checked that it fits:

That is... a lot worse than I expected. It looks like it is the holes that are drilled in the baseplate in the wrong place, rather than the template or the upright being wrong.

So indeed I should have used a drilling template. I'm not really sure how this happened.

Measuring the outer holes, they are 144mm apart, should be 140mm.

It looks like it'll fit in the other side of the baseplate though, so I'll fit that one and think about what to do. Probably the solution is to make the holes a lot bigger and mix in some epoxy & "Minerva powder" to take up the gap.

Gluing now:

It's 10am now, so I think at about 1pm I want to come and take the bolts & template off, and hopefully it won't have set too hard by that point.

While I'm here I might as well try to do some of the inserts for the linear rails. They'll want roughing up on the lathe first.

I've put the inserts in for the linear rails on the gantry:

I'll have to do some chiseling (and maybe filing) once the glue is dry, because I definitely got some glue on the flat surface, and I'm not sure whether some of the inserts are sticking up.

The holes have a bit of wiggle room, plus the inserts don't all look to have the thread particularly well-centred. So I don't know if the rails are going to line up with the holes. Hopefully I can drill out the rails if necessary.

It might have been an idea to do the threaded inserts for the Z axis first because it is a smaller part, would mean less to try and fix if it doesn't work. Oh well.

I put in the M6 threaded inserts for the BK12 as well:

I had it sitting flat on the bench at first, and the inserts kept sinking into the holes, so I put some flanged bolts in them to pull them up to the surface, but it looks like the bolts may end up glued into the inserts. I definitely need to try and loosen these before the glue sets. It's now 11am, so I'll probably try and take them out just after I take the template off the other part.

Great success, it was easy to get all the bolts off, and the template practically fell off once the bolts were out. So that was about 3 hours for the bolts in the template and 2 hours for the bolts in the BK12 mount.