Personally, i dont see significant benefit in this approach considering the amount of weight that would be carried by the y carriage to enable it. If you want to see a more refined version of what you are talking about take a look at the lulzbot mini, which seems to have implemented this quite successfully with the use of a preheating cycle and a very large wipe area. Alternately you could take aby chrisantoun14 - Developers
Hi Josh, This may be of little use to you, but the CNC mill we have at work moves relatively quickly and utilizes threaded rods for y , and z axis motion while the x axis seems to be a rack and pinion set up see: Shopbot Desktop Im not 100% sure what type of thread they run though. Chrisby chrisantoun14 - Developers
i find that if i am squishing the first layer too much the first layer comes out garbage and from there makes all the infill ontop of it rough. have you tried raising your first layer z-offset? it might do the trickby chrisantoun14 - General