After two months of actually building stuff, I've come to the decision to switch out the gantry with a corexy style mechanism. I don't know when I'll get to be able to work on any of it, especially on the holidays. I've also decided that in addition to the corexy, I'm going to stick a moving knot in there (maybe) to stabilize the Z axis for larger scale printers. My assumption is that, while aby Jacoby6000 - Extruded Aluminum Frames
After reading, it seems like the trolly design is inherently bad. The only way I can think of to reduce the the constraining is to stick with only two wheels per axis on the trolly. But then I wonder how Stable that would be. I really don't want to ditch the main concept, because I'd like to have an xy gantry where the axis' are doing an equal amount of work. I suppose if there's nothing I canby Jacoby6000 - Extruded Aluminum Frames
This is a very early draft, but my plan is to have 6 motors total. 2 for x, 2 for y, 1 for Z, and finally one for the extruder. I plan on using the lightest extruder I can find, to reduce the weight of the whole gantry assembly. For mounting the extruder, I'm going to use a larger mounting plate at the gantry hub, and affixing it to that through some means. The x and Y axis will be belt drby Jacoby6000 - Extruded Aluminum Frames
This is currently in the planning stage, while I build a repstrap for myself. Here's a screenshot of what I have so far And here is the sketchup file (hosted on mediafire) frame-with-gantry So far, I've designed an independent X/Y gantry, so they aren't adding extra stress to eachother. I don't like the idea of a moving bed, because that's where the print/material goes, and I can see someby Jacoby6000 - Extruded Aluminum Frames