$8 Z-axis

About a year ago I blogged an alternative Z-axis for Darwin using four tin can steppers instead of one expensive stepper and a belt drive. The only thing missing was a source of cheap motors to make it economically viable. Some time ago Forrest Higgs pointed out a source of cheap 15° motors for $2.50 made by Airpax. I also found them available for $2 at Surplus Shed. That makes a z-axis for $8 possible, which is much cheaper than original motor, let alone the belt.

They are surplus stock, so when they are gone they are gone, but there does seem to be a lot of them around. Unfortunately it costs more than $40 to ship them from the US, so the economics don't look nearly so good this side of the pond.

They are 12V 0.4A per coil, so four wired in parallel will take 1.6A, well withing the 2A capability of the RepRap electronics. They are six wire unipolar motors, but they can also be driven from a bipolar drive by using the red and orange wires as one coil and the green and brown as the other.

The pull in rate seems to be about 200pps, which would give 200 × 15 × 1.25 / 360 = ~10 mm/s with M8×1.25 threaded rod.

The boss on the back of the motor is a bit bigger than the motors I used before so I have updated the bracket design accordingly. The motors come with a spiral drive screw on the shaft. I could not find a way of getting it off, so I made a new coupling piece that clamps over it. It has a pointer so that it is visually obvious if the motors get out of step with each other.



I have uploaded both of these to Thingiverse. The other parts needed are shown below: -



And this is how they go together: -

Alternative Z-endstop

I prefer my machine to home the z-axis away from the workpiece so that homing is always a safe operation, regardless of what state the machine is in. The standard endstop bracket allows the opto to be mounted on the horizontal rails but for a bottom endstop it needs to be mounted off one of the vertical posts. I designed a new bracket and tab for this: -



The tab enters the opto from the side which gives the best resolution. Here it is installed :-



It can be mounted anywhere on the vertical post so could be used as a top endstop as well but I don't see the point of stops at both ends.

The way I calibrate HydraRaptor's z-axis for FFF is that I get the head somewhere near the table and measure how far away it is with a rule to get rough calibration. I then instruct it to go to 3mm above the table. I roll a 3mm bright steel rod under the nozzle and jog the axis up and down in s/w until it just touches. This has to be done with the nozzle fully warmed up to the working temperature because the PTFE expands about 0.5mm.

The calibration drifts on HydraRaptor because the frame is made from wood so the weather affects it, something that Darwin should not suffer from.

The files are here: www.thingiverse.com/thing:124.

A bit of a contraption

As I was adding the diagonal tie bars my wife said "it's becoming a bit of a contraption". I am not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing!

My alternative z-axis using four tin can stepper motors works reasonable well. I am running them from 36V with a constant current chopper drive. They are all wired in parallel and the total current is set to 1.25A. They have 22Ω coils so that corresponds to about 7V. I am guessing they are rated for 12V, but if you run steppers at their maximum rating they get very hot, especially when mounted on plastic rather than a metal chassis. Under running them, as I am, they only get to about 40°C, which should be fine even for PCL and PLA brackets. Total power used by the axis is about 9W.

The standard Darwin z-axis can carry a small child: reprap-prints-child. Not having any small children, I tested it with a vice that weighs 3.3Kg. As it would take 300 hours to print anything that size so I think it is a reasonable worst case test.

The pull-in step rate (i.e. the maximum rate that the motor will start at with no acceleration) is about 400 steps/second. It runs reliably at 320 steps/s, which is 8.33 mm/s. If I understand the settings page on the wiki then this is more than 10 times faster than people are running the belt drive version. Still much slower than HydraRaptor's z-axis though.

Here is a video of it in action: -


Alternative RepRap Darwin Z-axis from Nop Head on Vimeo

As you can hear, it doesn't make a lot of noise, something that is a big improvement on HydraRaptor, which has a very noisy z-axis.

The total travel is 230mm, which is also a bit better than the standard Darwin I think, but you have to subtract the length of the extruder barrel to get the maximum work height.

Deviant Z axis

The RepRap Darwin Z-axis has four screw thread drives linked by a timing belt and toothed pulleys, driven by a large stepper motor.



There are a few things about the design that I am not keen on: -

• The beefy motor and timing belt make it expensive.
• The belt tension puts lateral force on the threaded rod, which causes a lot of friction and looks like it will cause the plastic bearings to wear.
• Making the pulleys and splicing the belt seem like tricky things to get right.
  

When Forrest Higgs came across a small fast stepper motor I decided try an alternative scheme using four motors wired in parallel, eliminating the pulleys, belt and lateral forces. The four small motors are about the same price as the big one, so the cost of the timing belt is saved.



When the motors arrived I got a bit of shock at how small they were. Although I had seen photos from Forrest's blog they were about half the size I had imagined. They are lowish inductance and large step angle (15°) so they can go very fast.

I designed a bracket to hold the motor and mate up with the Darwin corner bracket: -



As you can see there is vast discrepancy between the shaft sizes and one quarter of the weight of the table is born by each of the tiny motor bearings. I was staring to get a bad feeling about the idea.

I had several unsuccessful attempts at making a flexible shaft coupling from ABS: -



None of these were flexible enough or concentric enough. My final design used a piece of plastic piping to get the flexibility.



It has a captive nut for the M3 set screw. The piping is just a friction fit and the rod screws into it.

Even with this design I had a problem with the eccentricity of the hole for the motor shaft.
When you make a hole with fused filament fabrication, the outline of the hole has a start and an end. This causes a bump in the perimeter. Possibly, the outline should end one filament diameter short of where it started, rather than being a full circle. Also each layer should start and end in a different place. When I get chance I will try this.

To remove the bump I ran a drill though the hole. When the hole is as small as this (2mm) the bump displaces the drill leaving the resulting hole off centre. I ended up having to drill them on the lathe, which is cheating.

I mounted the four motors and wired them up in parallel to a micro-stepping chopper drive and a 36V power supply.



I don't like the RepRap scheme of distributing the electronics around the machine so I mounted mine all together at the bottom of the machine on a sheet of perspex. The perspex rests on one of the base diagonals and is held in place by four brackets which clamp around the lower frame.



As soon as I powered it up I realised that the motors had nowhere near enough torque to turn the M8 threaded rods. It wasn't a big surprise, two things that were though:

The motors got ridiculously hot, well over 100°C before I switched them off. The coil resistance is 27Ω which is smaller than some much larger 12V motors, giving a dissipation of about 10W. These look more like 5V motors to me, either that or they are not continuously rated.

I found that my micro-stepping drives don't work well with tin can motors. The micro-steps are very uneven in size. Micro-stepping assumes that the torque displacement curve of the motor is sinusoidal, which doesn't seem to be the case for large step angle tin can motors. Not a big problem in this case as I don't need the extra resolution. I will replace the drive with something simpler when I have got the machine working.

So all in all a big failed experiment! I should have wired up one of the motors before I wasted the plastic making all the mounts.

My fall back plan was to use some larger tin can motors I rescued from a skip recently.



The one on the left is bipolar and the one on the right is unipolar. I decided to try the bipolar ones first, I may switch to the unipolar to simplify the electronics, if they have enough torque.

The shaft coupling was much easier to make because the shaft is bigger (4mm) and has a pin through it. I didn't need to resort to the lathe this time.




I designed and made a new set of motor brackets, they took about 8 hours to print in total.



Here is one motor installed: -



It seems to have plenty of torque for the job. I am waiting for more bolts to arrive to mount the others.

These are not low inductance motors so they won't be as fast as the original single motor design. The large step angle (7.5°) and my 36V supply will help to mitigate this. I originally thought the z-axis speed was unimportant because it moves so rarely, but actually on HydraRaptor I use the z-axis to lift the head 0.4mm when moving between filament runs so it does need to be reasonably quick.

This scheme certainly simplifies the mechanical construction but may not make economic sense. The motors are cheap in large volume (£2-3) but I haven't found a retail price.

Spanning a void

s0lstice requested that the next time HydraRaptor was extruding into fresh air I should post a video, so here is a video of a part with a large covered void being made: -


Spanning a void from Nop Head on Vimeo.

It is a bracket to mount a tiny stepper onto a Darwin corner bracket.



As you can see, the unsupported layer is very untidy, but the next layer sorts itself out. The reason I had to make this side the top is that there are projections on the bottom to mate with the corner bracket: -



Here is what it looks like installed. I need to sort out a shaft coupling. I have no idea if the motors will be powerful enough though.



I also made some feet for my Darwin to stop it scratching the table: -



I stuck felt pads, that I happened to have, on them, but rubber would probably be better for non slip.