Maslow Rigid Z-axis custom part

thingiverse

The Z axis control on the Rigid router (recommended for Maslow) suffers from too much play in three different areas: the traveler on the lead screw is not tight, and "wobbles", the lead screw itself has some play in it, and the key that mates to the router is not tight. This print is meant to replace the traveler that rides on the Z-axis lead screw and pushes the router up and down, to try to remove some of this play. In addition to this part, I also added a washer to the lead screw to remove some of the back and forth there. I hammered a standard washer flatter to fit. My material of choice was polycarbonate, which I barely reach the temperature for on my machine, but makes a very robust piece. Other plastics would probably work as well. I've listed this as a work in progress because the threaded hole ended up too far "forward" because of the way the original has a larger hole with a spring release, that causes the center, where the lead screw goes through, to get pushed slightly off center, and I just centered mine with the original hole. This caused the key to not quite make it to the slot, and so I had to trim it some to fit, and also made the spring too loose, which took some bending to fix. Also, the key is a little small for the slot in the router (matches the original, but still too small), so there's still significant play from that. And the threading was a little tight on mine, so I had to work the screw a bit to get it to fit. I wanted to put this out there now because, now that I have something that works, it may be a while before I get around to revisiting the design, and I wanted to give others a head start and a chance to improve upon the design. To this end I've included all the original FreeCad design files for the part, the lead screw used to make the threading, and the combined part. I'll be sure to update this whenever I get around to improving, if someone else doesn't get to it first!