Yazzo Linear Slide Carriage

thingiverse

This is the first design my daughter has made. I said to here, "How can you improve on that other design which has limitations?", and she came up with this. A modification on the first version. The first version of the Z-carriage had a couple of limitations. One was the fact that there is a limit to how big you can print the thing. If you're platform is only 100mm, then the maximum separation you could have had was 100mm. The other limitation is actually one of the interesting design points. It created a teater totter between the sliding rods and the opposing lead screw using the mounting rod as the fulcrum. Although interesting for easy balance and support, it limits the distance between the lead screw and the front face of the carriage. Bottom line, it's a nice design, but we came up with a better way. This thing is a carriage that is meant to ride along the z-axis. It has capture nuts on the bottom, and in the middle, so that it will ride up and down with the turning of the lead screw. It is printed in two identical pieces, which are flipped over and mated to each other with the central capture nut. It's a pretty beefy assembly, which takes a good part of an hour to print on my Up! printer at 0.25mm, Loose, Normal. It has to be beefy as it is the foundation of the cantilever clips: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5783 All combined, a couple of these pieces, plus the cantilever clips, and 3 nuts, makes for a very nice linear slide carriage. A further improvement would be to have some graphite infused bushings captured into the holes that slide along the smooth rods, but that's for another design. The piece of paper in the photos is the actual design sketch my daughter used to flesh out the idea. I thought it was kind of funny as we tried to draw in perspective. Instructions 1) Look at your design where you'd going to put a vertical linear slide. 2) Measure the center distance from the lead screw to the center of the mounting rod. 3) Measure the center distance from the lead screw out to the center of the sliding rods. 4) Use those measurements to alter the OpenScad file to suit your needs. 5) Print a couple of these pieces out 6) Use a heat gun, or some form of heat, to loosen up the holes for the capture nuts 7) Force the capture nuts into their holes. Note: There is a mating nut between the two pieces. It is half the height of the nut. Press a nut into one half, flip the other piece over, and mate it to this nut. This serves to align and hold the two halves together. 8) Press is all together and thread it onto the leadscrew of your linear slide. 9) Slip the smooth rods into their proper places in the carriage, and into their proper places in the endoskeleton 10) Place a couple of cantilever clips over the verticals of the carriage 11) Rejoice! This is a nice conceptual design. In reality, it won't work optimally until there are captured bushings of some sort in the holes on the linear slides. Also, if you don't get the nut aligned nice and flat, it will cause binding which may either result in wobble, or simply make the lead screw too hard to turn. These are fairly big pieces, depending. You'll want to do your best to prevent warping, although the design is somewhat forgiving to warping on what starts out as the "bottom" of the pieces. Although the application here is for a vertical rise, the exact same pieces can be used for a horizontal carriage.