I have been doing some more thinking,and i have a few ideas/questions.

3D Printing
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1

I have been doing some more thinking,and i have a few ideas/questions.

Why not connect the vertical screws via a belt rather than having a stepper for each pillar? If you connect the pillars using a belt you could have more pillars with out adding steppers.

Why only 2 pillars? it would seem that 3 pillars would increase the rigidity and insure that the axis are more perpendicular.

Is there a reason for using 2 motors on an axis rather than a drive shaft? If you had 1 motor coupled to a drive shaft it would insure that both ends turn at the same rate.

Is there a reason why the gantry moves rather than the print? It seems to me that moving the gantry introduces allot of extra work.

I am thinking or remixing this to make it have all of the electronics up top, and all of the motors fixed but lowering the print. Reworking the z-drive to be belt coupled, reworking the x-z to be rod coupled, and a few other small tweaks.

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I’m toying with making the counterweight a loop to cut down on oscillation, heck, I may even swap the counterweight out for a friction slide.

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@Shauki I am thinking about still using screw drives, but only having 1 motor. Each screw would have a gear on it, and the belt would turn the 3 pillars at the same rate.

Knowing that you want to do ceramics on it, it does make sense that you want a static print floor.

4

The reason i am trying to reduce the number of motors is at this point we are looking at 7-10 steppers, if you want to have 2 extruders and 3 pillars.

The other thought i had was to make it a core x-y belt drive instead of x-y independent, but i am not to confident in that setup.

5

I will start the cad work… It will be in openSCAD… So it will take some time… But it will be parametric.

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It might be faster to just grow a human, rather than print them out.