It seems that my attention and focus has been drawn to personal and work matters lately so there hasn’t been much time for blogging lately. Hopefully by bandwidth will increase in the future and I’ll be able to have more time for the fun stuff.
Anyway.. I’ve been helping to assemble a Kossel Clear kit. at the maker space I belong to and this has been getting my creative juices flowing again. As I think I’ve posted previously, there are aspects of this design, I really like that I to use some of the elements as inspiration into my next 3d printer design. I think helping on assembling this printer will be a good thing for my printer since it will help me focus on the design elements of the Kossel.
The Kossel Clear design is elegant but there is one issue that I find annoying: It lacks torsional rigidity. Since we’re using 15mm[?] extrusions it seems like things move around a lot. Perhaps, this won’t matter, but this is something that would drive me nuts a printer of my own design.. A simple fix is to use thicker extrusions or make cross bracing. Unfortunately, I purchased the extrusions for my project and cross bracing is not and option since to would destroy the cool look of the Kossell.
I think for my design, I’m going to enclose my printer in plexiglass. This should give it rigidity. I basically printed out the base for my “Wedgie” design, and I was pleased with this arrangement. The next iteration needs to incorporate some mounts to attach plexiglass walls. Before I do that, however I’m going to need to work out wheel support for the vertical rails and make sure that I don’t have interference with the plexiglass walls. This is going to take a little bit of time to work out since I want to incorporate magnetic ball joints into my design, with a differential screw to be able to dial in the magnetic pull on the magnetic ball joint to optimize performance(this is going to take a while given the limited amount of time I have to work on this.
One other thing I wanted to mention, in doing some research I stumbled on this site: https://sites.google.com/site/3dprinterlist/home
What a nice site… Very nicely indexed. The only issue I had was that it’s not optimized for Android.
I’m thinking that I’m going to keep the Arm spacing the same to the Kossell Clear, and potentially make a magnetic ball joint retrofit kit available for the clear..