Parametric Carriage Base for V-Slot Printers by GeoDave

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

I originally designed this openscad script to be used with my Emmett-Delta 3d printer that uses 2060 V-Slot for the Vertical columns & 3/4" EMT for the horizontal supports. I took some extra time & made this parametric to facilitate changing it for different configurations. It looks kind of like a dog bone in this setup, but you can change 17 different variables to make it in almost unlimited configurations. The carriage that holds the belt and rods is a separate file, so you can use your own carriage. You just need to have the module that draws the carriage named DrawCarriage()
The 1st variable in the file, W_X_Offset is the horizontal offset between the center line of the carriage & the wheel. I use 39.9mm for use with 2060, 19.9mm for 2020, 29.9 for 2040 & 49.9 for 2080. Those numbers work for me, but you might need to adjust them for your configuration. Most of the variables should be described well, but you can easily change any to see how the part adjusts. Sometimes you may have to change more than 1 variable to make the geometry work out as I did not program this to handle all the problems. Some cases just will not work, like trying to create the top or bottom side below outside diameter of the corner wheels. You can put it flush with them though by setting any of the 3 variables, FlushTop, FlushBottom, FlushSides = 1. The default height (Ht) is set to 6mm. a minimum of 3 will work with ledges on. You can go lower than that if you turn ledges off. The maximum height is only limited to how thick you want it.
I like the dog bone style since it allows me to get a little more height on the carriage before hitting the end stops. It also seems to be pretty strong having the curves & ledges.
Even though this was designed for V-Slot, you can probably use this design for a lot of other possibilities.
I drew this up in 2d 1st using DraftSight to see how the geometry looks and use the dimensions to work backward to get the formulas I need for the openscad script.