It’s alive! – kind of. MGN12 Rails update

Well, the MGN12H linear rail carriages fit into the new carriage adaptors I quickly knocked up in Tinkercad perfectly!

And, don’t they look lovely in Purple (great filament from 3D Filaprint)

Now, to dismantle the printer and see if the print bed tray fits…………

That’s the problem with printing stuff to upgrade a printer, iterating takes time and stuff gets dismantled waaay too much! I need a second printer :-p

MGN12H crappy linear rail bearing blocks

What’s more sensible than spending $9USD on a basic, possibly non working chinese no-name bearing block?

……..Spending hours and a few quid trying to do ’em up!

Parts I’ll need…

• 3/32 Drill Bit (or possibly 2.4mm if it needs some play) …………..[edit, turns out a 2.4mm is too small! Looks like 2.5 is the go]

• 3/32 Ball bearings (bound to loose a few)
• Something to drill with
• something to clamp down the carriage without damaging it

After a few minutes with the calipers and Tinkercad, I give you……….

Chinese ‘cheap’ clone linear rails MGN12 Beware and a teardown

The Cheapy ‘Hiwin’ clone rails and blocks arrived a while back and they haven’t really dissapointed. By that, I mean, I kinda got what I was expecting. Still, only a small premium paid and 3 workable carriages / rails……

D9 Linear rails upgrade – Bed

I’ve found a solution to having a fairly stable base that’s wider than the 60mm square wheel carriages Wanhao uses…

It’s possible to create a 120mm wide base, IF you offset the mounting of the bearing blocks from the centre as can be seen above and below…

Wanhao D9-300 Linear rails upgrades…

Just running through a few ideas in Tinkercad whilst I await some parts to arrive….it pays to mockup things before committing to a design, I’m liking how easy Tinkercad is to do something that, on the surface looks quite complex………

on My D9, looking from the front, the Y axis rails are spaced at 202mm edge to edge….so it makes sense that an approximatley 202mm deep by 202mm wide square would form the most stable base available, whilst still using the original dimensions of the frame………..

….Nope…..

 

 

The mockup above  shows a base plate of 202mm square bolted straight to the Hiwin clone rails……also shows the 325mm outline of the heated bed – it’s transparent to help visualise

Unfortunatley, having a 202mm square base for the linear rails bearing blocks has prevented the 325mm moving bed from obtaining its full travel – you can see below the the vertical line of the extruder output is not too far from the centre of the bed, even though if the bed moves forward, the bearing blocks will run off the end of the rails

This image below shows how far the blocks need to move off the end of the rails to allow the extruder to almost reach the edge of the heated bed

 

The extruder can easily reach the end of  the heated bed when the bed travels backwards – with the additional slight overhang provided by the 500mm long rails being used

 

so, summary

I’m not going to be using a 200ish mm square base plate with my 4 linear rail blocks on!…

it’s looking like it’ll need to be a 200ish wide rectangle that’s hopefully not less than 100mm deep – as the linear rail blocks are 45mm!