X Axis Carriage Assembly

I've decide not to update my blog every time I tighten a screw.  Instead I will update whenever I've completed a section.  That way I won't bore you too much.

Comments have been made saying that I'm not explaining things simply enough and thinking about it, unless you are familiar with all the terms, some references I make will not make sense.  So then, what's all this X, Y and Z stuff I keep going on about you may ask.  Well, in 3D printing everything works in 3 axis's unlike a normal printer that only works in 2 axis's, the X and Y. For example, looking down from the top onto a printed piece of paper everything is printed in one plane, the X Y plane.  The print head of a normal printer moves about the X axis and the paper itself is moved a fraction at a time in the Y axis.


The X Carriage holds the extruder

When looking at a 3D printer from the front, the X axis is movement from left to right or right to left.  This is done by movement of the actual print head (Hot End or Extruder) which is mounted to the X Axis Carriage and runs along 2 smooth rods.  All of which I have just finished tonight.

The Y axis is the movement of the The Frog Plate which supports the heated bed where the 3D object is printed on. The build of this was described in an earlier post. The heated bed moves front to back or back to front along the Y axis assembly also on 2 smooth rods.

The extra dimension for a 3D printer is the Z axis.  The Z axis movement starts at the bottom just above the heated bed and moves a fraction of a millimeter at a time upwards as each layer is printed.  All 3 of these movements happen at the same time to build a 3D object and are controlled by little electronic motors.

Hope that's shed some light on how a 3D printer works a little.  There's lots of other technologies not covered yet, but I'll try explain what's what when I get to them.



Idle end of X  Carriage cracked

As for tonight's work I have made some mistakes.  First of the X Carriage itself had dozens of nuts, bolts and washers.  Once it had been built I had 2 nuts and one washer left over!  Like building something from Ikea.  That meant I hadn't read the instruction properly and had to review everything I'd done, count all the items and compare what I had made with the pictures on the Web.  Got it all figured out in the end though.

The smooth rods I used were the wrong length.  I had used the smooth rods that were supposed to have been used for the frog plate or Y axis.  Needed to undo those and swap them over.  In the process of me doing so meant re-inserting them back into the X Carriage ends.  Using too much force cracked one of the printed parts.  It's still intact, but I hope I can get away with super glueing back as it is not completely broken and won't be weight bearing when in operation.  Fingers crossed.  I can always print out a new part once the whole thing has been built.

Assembled X Carriage

One last mistake I made was not to de-burr or round off the ends of the smooth rods enough.  As I needed to insert these rods through bearings more than once, they caught the inside of one of them and popped out a couple of the tiny little ball bearings that were inside.  This should not matter too much as all the others are are held firmly in place with the smooth rod inserted.