K40 Height Adjust by Klave

Last crawled date: 3 years, 3 months ago

For those of us who cut a hole in the bottom of their K40 laser to fit a rotary tool, this may be useful to change the height of the laser. These legs replace the castor wheels which are a hazard anyway.
Legs let you change the height of the laser by turning the sleeve sections. The thread is 2.5mm pitch so one turn will change the height by 5mm. The sleeve has 10 flutes so one flute of turn will change the height 0.5mm. One of the flutes has a reference mark, you may want to write on the others, 0 to 5mm in 0.5mm steps or every second one for 1mm steps
The top threaded section will fit the nut from the castor wheel. You should tighten this lightly to prevent the top turning when you adjust the sleeve and some adhesive will be a good idea. I used some non-slip material that is usually put under carpets, mirror tape will be better.
You can't tighten this nut much, its just PLA.
There are 2 options for the top LH thread screw, one has a wide cap that supports the laser enclosure. I did this to strengthen the thinner screw joint, not sure if its necessary. This part gets printed with the cap down and will need supports with a concentric pattern for easy removal, I also use 3 line count for the shell and 45% infill. Uses 15g/5m of material taking almost 2 hours to print. This may be an overkill but putting those top nuts in can be a pain on one or 2 of them and I don't want to do that twice for the cost of a few grammes of filament.
The foot should have some anti slip material to ensure it doesn't turn.
The top left hand threaded post and bottom right hand threaded foot have had their diameter scaled by 96.5% so that they turn easily when printed. The smaller top threaded section is unchanged because the nut seems quite loose anyway.
I added a very small amount of silicone grease to the threads, this may be a bad idea in the long run but it did turn more smoothly afterwards.
Total adjustment is about 50mm, the threads are 35mm long but you need to leave about 3 threads engaged for stability.
Make sure the top and bottom don't turn when adjusting or the height will be inaccurate and it may come loose at the end.
Print time was 5 hours on my E3 v2