Moving bed or Moving Gantry(Head)

Hi Guys,

I'm building a CoreXY printer, and using a Dual Wire Gantry drive system. [reprap.org])

But for the bed movement I'm going to go with the wire system as well for its drive, but cant decided whether to have a moving gantry or a moving bed in the Z axis.

I'm leaning towards moving the Bed in the Z, but was curious, would it be better to move the gantry instead.

Celcius1

I was thinking about doing a moving gantry, but then thought that the head wizzing around may cause more artifacts in the print since it would be less stable then solidly mounted to the frame with a bed that lowers.. I havnt built either idea yet though so this I is purely guessing on my part.

I feel like most people move the bed for a reason. XY is constantly moving, moving in it in another axis might add too many degrees of freedom. I can't imagine a benefit.

Most of the cables connect to the XY stage. Moving it up and down would require some extra effort to make sure the cables are long enough and free to move as needed. If you move the bed up and down the only (usually) electrical connections to the moving parts are the wires for the bed heater and thermistor.

Then there's the moving masses in XY stage- you'd have to build an extra stiff Z axis to handle that without getting any print artifacts.

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Ultra MegaMax Dominator 3D printer: [drmrehorst.blogspot.com]