Clonedel drilling & technical drawings of prusa mendel

Hello everyone,

Yesterday I started drilling my clonedel parts.
The parts are a bit more warped than I expected and the casting seems to be slanted a little.
This makes it very difficult to drill straight holes in the plastic.

I've allready identified a mismatch between the drill holes in the top vertices and the z-motor mounts
making it impossible to assemble it.

To make sure I don't ruin any more parts and don't have to recreate them in wood I'd like to compare them
to technical drawings. I've found an imperial drawing set, but haven't found a metric one. Does it exist?
I don't have a computer in my workplace so it's a bit hard to walk back and forth between the computer
desk & workplace. (Not to mention the dust that comes of the plastic).

Any pointers?

Evert

In order to correctly match the holes in the top vertices and the z-motor mounts I connected one side and redrilled the other through the z-motor.
I did not find a metric set of drilling instructions and SAE ones are minimal which forced me to understand how it all has to be assembled before drilling

Hmm i should have thought of that before drilling :-/. *knocks himself in the head

Since you have experience building a clonedel, the accuracies of the holes seem to be off a little and I don't see a possibility to adjust the horizontal rails (y-direction) vertically. How do you manage to put the guiding (smooth) rods in a single plane?
As far as I can tell, if the bottom vertices aren't perfect the supporting rods will be in a "twisted plane" making it next to impossible to achieve a horizontal y-axis.

Which leads me to a more general question: how does the mendel design approach the accurate positioning of the guiding rods?
E.g.: equiplanar location of the rods, and right angle orientation of the axis?

Evert

Mendel is designed to be made from printed parts, so the X rods are coplanar and parallel from the assumption that two parts printed on the same machine will have matching parallel holes. The Y and Z axes are aligned with jigs, spirit level and plumb line as described in the instructions.

People always have problems with the holes in moulded parts because accurately drilling holes in plastic is difficult. The whole point of reprap is that the machine makes the difficult to make parts.

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[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]

I use a drill press on slow speed so that I keep the drill at 90degrees and that makes a huge difference as it is so much more controllable

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Experimenting in 3D in New Zealand

I also used a drill press at a fairly slow speed, along with a vice. Any parts that had to match closely I drilled one through the other. For the motor mounts I made a template in order to get the holes exactly right. Regarding the horizontal y axis perhaps I was lucky, or careful to drill the holes at 90 degrees, because I have a pretty good plane. The problem of a twisted plane was not something that I anticipated so I would say that I was lucky .
I used brass bushings but if I was to do it again I think that I would try the PLA bushings. I think that gluing the PLA bushings in place is a lot easier than attaching the brass bushings.

Someone made a metric drilling drawing recently, it's up in the wiki here: [reprap.org]

This will make my life easier for the drilling of the next parts :-)