Y-Rod Shaft Stop

For years and years, the direct drive shaft gave me very little trouble. For some reason it has started shifting and falling out of the oldham coupler recently. I can't identify any reason, but perhaps it is related to printing more stuff that spans most of the printbed.

I've now printed and installed this nonsense:

Using the techniques I worked out in Captured Magnets, I printed a hollow cone with an M5 nut trap at the end and an attached cube with a space for a salvaged disk drive magnet to hold it to the solidoodle.

The bolt at the top of the cone can be adjusted to give the Y shaft very little room to move unless it really wants to move badly enough to break the cone or push off the magnet (I'll see if I have any problems as time goes by).

The files for this part are in shaft.tar.bz2 (but won't do you any real good unless you have the exact same magnet and same amount of extra Y shaft sticking out the side).

Update: I think I've found the real culprit here. The idler pulley in the top right corner sometimes binds up and won't turn so the fishing line gets dragged across it (it has now frayed enough to notice), no doubt requiring lots of extra force on that side. This is probably the source of the mysterious squeak I've been hearing as well. I could add some lithium grease after cleaning it up, but I may have a spare pulley with actual bearings in my parts collection (nope, not one that fits in the available space). Perhaps I should fixup the idler on the other side as well since it has been turning just as long (nope, way too fiddly to replace one, don't want to do two).

Of course there is no reason to remove this new shaft stop now that I've added it (it just shouldn't be needed very often).

Go back to my main Solidoodle page.