Finished Z axis and print bed

I finished the next part of the design - designing the Z axis.

For all of you that dont know what it is -

What is a CoreXY printer, and whats an Axis ?

There are different ways a 3d printer can move, but im using the method called CoreXY, which is the traditional one.

A 3d printer needs movement in some way in all 3 axises (axi ? axiss? axisses ? …. axes ?) - no not an actual ax, but a vector of movement like in a coordinate system.

In simple word for dumb human, printer go up back and right

In a CoreXY printer, the printhead only moves in (guess what ?) X and Y. So you might be wondering how it moves in Z (up and down). Well thats what i worked on today.

You see, instead of the printhead going up and down, the print bed (where the filament gets printed on to) moves up and down - that way the bed rises to meet the printhead, and if the print grows taller, the bed moves down.

Sound easy right ?

Heh.

Now we move on to the

Movement Method

Now that we know what we wanna move and where we wanna move it, we have to figure out HOW we can move it

Luckily there are only 2 common methods to move stuff in a 3D printer

• Linear rails
  and
  -Linear rods

Linear rails

Linear rails are little train tracks that you put wheels on to - these wheels are then moved by a belt thats attached to a pulley thats atttached to a stepper motor - basically when i spin my stepper motor, it spins a litlle round wheel - that little round wheel is attached to a belt that then gets moved by the wheel.

The moving Belt then also moves our bed.

Linear rods

Linear rods are much simpler. Here our lovely Stepper motor (im calling him Steppy from now on) spins a rod - basically a rlly long screw.

This screw is then attached to our bed (not exactly, its actually attached to a small 3d printed mount that the bed is attached to cause we need to heat the bed but - shut up nerd panda)

When the motor spins left so does the screw/rod - in classic screw fashion that causes our bed to rise up.

If it turns right, the exact opposite happens

” Lefty loosey, Righty Tighty” - Me probably

For the Pandaprint, i chose to use linear rails instead of rods, since that seems to be common practice in the 3D printing community.

There is one gaping hole in my logic that some of you imaginary readers may have discovered - wont my bed just try and spin wildly ? um … yes.

The fix is rather simple - add something that stops the rotation !

Thats why the bed mount is also attached to a carriage on a linear rails - this fastens it and stops rotation , while still allowing it to move along the axis it has to move along.

Up next

Tomorrow ill start work on the gantry (aka X and Z)

Here ill go with the previously mentioned belted approach - lets see how that goes :D