As you can see I've been printing some things off I have been raiding Thingiverse for test pieces, mainly using http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1216 its a really detailed model I've had some excellent results printing, I am really happy with the quality of the prints I am getting, but there's still some tweaking to go (there always will be)
This is the current state of my workbench, features include state of the art material metering system, advanced climate control and clean layout of components.
So while working on my design I decided to use leadscrews mainly because they are accurate and easy to implement (on a small scale) and they work great, however the sacrifice in speed (due to the power of the motors) is significant. Another negative impact the leadscrews have in my design is vibrations.
The installation in my deign is a bit.. well crappy. In professional machines a leadscrew is held in place with bearings and rotated or the leadscrew is clamped solid and the motor is clamped to the axis and pulls the axis up and down the leadscrew. Due to the fact that I do no have access to a workshop I am limited in what I can build and the accuracy of the things I can build. So I don't have the motors perfectly lined up with the leadnuts there are eccentricities which are unnoticeable in all the axis except the the x-axis which causes a pronounced vibration when trying to move at medium to high speeds.
2 Solutions present themselves constraining the leadscrew with bearings or swapping out to belts. Recently I have discovered a new supplier of reprap supplies in Australia; Builby CNC they have and excellent supply of materials and parts I will be ordering a couple of pulleys and some belt for the X and Y axis on my machine I can manufacture the parts I need to mount the motors and clamp the belt etc then install the new drive system, this will eliminate the vibrations and maybe give me an increase in speed aswell.
So the project moves on, now I have a working 3D printer I will use it to improve itself
