On Sat, Jun 06, 2009 at 12:10:42PM -0500, Jon Elson wrote: > It may be possible to adapt something to the side of the quill, but my > experience with a ballscrew drive that attaches to the quill nose > showed it was a poor solution. if you made it insanely rigid, it MIGHT > work OK, the one I saw "looked" adequate, but measurement showed a lot > of fles.
It seems to be that or the rack, and short of plating nickel or something similar onto the existing pinion, in an attempt to remove the backlash, the rack is not too promising. ... > If the 1" thick plate doesn't reduce quill travel, then you may have a > solution. Clamping it onto the 2" length of widened quill nose which doesn't retract into the head leaves room for another of the same thicknes, without affecting travel. :-) > Especially since this machine also has a horizontal spindle, it may > make a lot more sense to make the knee the driven axis (Z for > vertical, Y for horiz. spindle). Ah, that's another great suggestion, Jon. It would provide greater Z travel than the quill, too. And it would leave the quill accessible for manual operations. There's also less engineering involved in replacing the crown gears and acme screw with a belt driven ballscrew. (The bottom of this knee is largely open, and a belt could run horizontally forward to a flattish motor, without the need for additional holes. The motor can fit under the shallower front of the knee, without significant protrusion.) However, TANSTAAFL applies though, because locking the knee while the quill provides Z travel, would be a more rigid arrangement, I suspect. (A little more like a bed machine.) There's also an extra layer of steel in the table swivel, so there's quite a bit of mass to hoik up and down while cutting each tooth on an HTD pulley. It wouldn't be a speed demon. Still, there's great merit in modifying the easy axes first, so swarf can be made, then (planning to) modify the hard one later. Erik ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ OpenSolaris 2009.06 is a cutting edge operating system for enterprises looking to deploy the next generation of Solaris that includes the latest innovations from Sun and the OpenSource community. Download a copy and enjoy capabilities such as Networking, Storage and Virtualization. Go to: http://p.sf.net/sfu/opensolaris-get _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
