Steady as she goes

I can confirm my homemade "three point steady" does work, I made this with it :-



It's the RepRap extruder drive screw which fits in the bearings shown in my last post. The RepRap instructions say to use a blow torch and plumber's flux to attach the steel cable but I found it easier to use a soldering iron and electrical solder.

Here it is installed with a small G-clamp in place of the top half of the pump :-



And here is a video of it being tested with a variable DC power supply until it shed the clamp :-

Bearing up

The bearings for the extruder pump are supposed to be made from brass and I had a bit of brass rod earmarked for the job. It is only 9mm diameter but the bearings are supposed to be 10mm. I had planned to make the holes in the pump housing smaller to compensate but I forgot. While wondering what to do I just happened to find a 10mm steel pin lying around at a rubbish tip.



The fact that there is no rust on it suggests that it is some form of stainless steel. It is certainly quite hard. I tried to cut it on the lathe with a parting off tool and all it it did was take the tip off the tool.



I next tried cutting it by holding a hacksaw against it while spinning it in the lathe. That worked but was very slow and shook the lathe a lot. By far the best way was to just saw it in a vice with the hacksaw.

I drilled the hole down the middle on the lathe. I had trouble centering the pilot drill. You are supposed to use a special center drill as described here, but I don't have one of those so I used the surprising technique called "catching the centre". Here are a couple of excellent videos I found that describe this technique: -





Once I had got the drill started I put the chuck back in the tailstock and drilled the full length with 1mm, 2mm and 3mm drills.

Here are the finished bearings :-



The RepRap instructions suggest that the bearings should be made after the spindle but I think it is better the do it the other way round. That way you can try the bearings against the spindle while it is still in the lathe and turn the spindle down to the right fit.

Steady on

A friend pointed out to me that actually I have reinvented the "three point steady". Here are some examples I found on the web :-







Incidentally the only reason mine has flat sides is because the width was limited by the size of the raw material .

I have not had a chance to try it out yet, but it looks like I am on a well trodden track.

I have had a request to show the ten lines of Python which draw the simulation window. These are :-

In the constructor:

self.root = Tk()
self.root.title("HydraRaptor")
frame = Frame(self.root)
frame.pack()
self.canvas = Canvas(frame, width = 710, height = 765)
self.canvas.create_rectangle(-70*5, -76*5, 70*5, 76*5)
self.canvas.pack()

In the destructor:
self.canvas.config(scrollregion=self.canvas.bbox(ALL))
self.root.mainloop()

In the feed_xy function:
self.canvas.create_line(self.xy[0]*5, -self.xy[1]*5, pos[0]*5, -pos[1]*5)

I am sure there is a better way to do the scaling, replacing the magic numbers with constants would be a start!