Well, cutting down actually. Yesterday and today I spent several hours in the shop cutting some more trial parts so we could test out our latest round of changes. We reworked the X carriage to make it easier to assemble. We also redesigned the Y carriage bearing supports to reduce both the total number of bearings and the total number of unique parts. I made parts in both the plastic/lumbar (Trex) and some random plastic from the store (chopping block). Here is a short video of our machine hard at work.
Todd and I spent the afternoon trying the new parts. This involved taking the previous machine down to nothing and putting it back together again. This process took us about 6 hours so far (still in progress); but only because we don't have to look at the pictures every 2 minutes :). The good news is that both the x-axis and y-axis changes seem to work well. The bad news is we still have more rotational play where the x motor rides up and down the z axis than we would like. It hasn't affected the print quality at all but we still don't like it. Fortunately I was anticipating this and already have a solution in mind. In the next couple days I expect to have the new parts cut and ready for another trial assembly. Maybe in a few more days we'll even be ready to sell some kits.
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