Ord Bot Z-Axis Conversion to Belt Drive by runninfarmer

Last crawled date: 2 years, 12 months ago

I had problems with my ord bot lead screws causing my motors to grind and get out of sync. I had experience with a belt drive delta bot so I wanted to make the switch to make my z-axis belt drive. It's working pretty smooth. The only real drawback is that the gantry will fall once the motors are un-powered so I still need to design flip out rest for it at the top.
I've posted the stl files as well as the scad files. My motors actually atach to aluminum angle with holes meant for the original setup. The belt clamp should bolt right to a z-lift block hole. You might need to drill the other one out though from the gantry plate. Let me know if you have any questions!
Advantages of belt driven Z-axis:
Fast response for max z endstop homing
Better suited for autoleveling (in my opinion)
Zero z-wobble
No need for lubrication and less noise as a result.
I have posted a couple images of a 20 hr print of a large football helmet that demonstrates good looking layers at 0.2 mm layer height.
**Update: Added a mashup of http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:43069 with my current motor bracket so it will work with misumi, as recommended by blah_59.
Here's videos of the first tests and printing:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvG_cZWBxVkhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6Kx2tsMY4Ihttp://youtu.be/4NoBIgc69HM
**Make sure to hook up z-axis motors separatley and reversed. I hooked them both up in the same direction and fried a driver due to the motors working against each other!***
Update-03/10/14: I have now implemented a counter balance pulley system using 2 lbs of lead sinkers and 30 lb test fishing line. I've posted the updated files. Credit goes to whosawhatsis http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3970 for the printed idler pulleys.