Mostly just more destruction

Post date: Mar 9, 2014 9:58:05 PM

This week mostly looks like more destruction.

That is, of course, not entirely true- I finished a new stepper mount (effectively identical to the one shown in the previous post) for the X axis, and tried to get it installed. It turns out the sides of my machine aren't entirely perpendicular to the X axis, so aligning it has proved to be a challenge. This is the technique I've been using- trying to reflect a laser back at its origin:

That's a laser level clamped to the X axis. You can also see the rather unexciting stepper mounting plate. Perhaps more exciting is the "mirror" I'm using to reflect the laser. Yes, that is a silicon wafer. Evidently that's easier to find than an actual mirror around here.

After unsuccessfully trying to shim the mounting plate into the correct plane, I think what we'll end up doing is is put some epoxy putty between the plate and the side of the machine, screw the plate down to perpendicular, then let it harden. At that point we should be able to screw everything down nice and tight while still having it be perpendicular.

As a side note, a bunch of tedious work isn't shown here- getting the leadnut on the X axis carriage aligned with the direction of motion. I didn't take a picture firstly because it looks pretty much the same as the Y axis (which I evidently didn't take a good picture of either... oops. This is about the best I can do- you can (barely) see it in the upper left), and secondly because it was already mounted at the time it occurred to me to get a picture. It seemed like too much work to take it apart again.