Fixed angle screw on lever dial indicator mount by Chalado

Last crawled date: 2 years, 11 months ago

Ever wondered how level your bed actually is? Well not everybody owns a nice set of feeler gauges. But certainly every true 3D printing nerd calls a lever dial indicator their own. If you are that, this is for you.
This mount is designed to be screwed on to a standard 40x40 fan so you don't have to disassemble the entire hotend for your measurements. It even incorporates adequately sized airflow cutouts so that your fan can keep spinning without issues. Maybe you can even leave it attached while printing - though I haven't tried that so far.
The second good thing about this mount is that the measuring position is quite close to the nozzle. So the coordinate offset from printing to measuring is kept small, depending on the size and shape of your indicator.
The hole is 8mm in diameter and the clamping screw is M3x10. The mounting holes are designed to fit M4 screws with a tiny bit of slack to get a genuinely compressed mounting without play. If you do screw the mount into a fan like I did, use coarse 4mm self cutting screws rather than M4 machining screws as they will give you much less risk of shearing the threads in the fan holes for repeated mounting.
If you own a straight edge or surface plate or anything with known flat top you can also determine the imperfections in your x axis rail by running the indicator across said known surface.