This week, out of the blue a mate of mine posted some 3d printers from kickstarter on my Facebook page. They were of different designs but all had two things in common, which was that they all had the work move in one plane and all only had one support for the z plane. I had, as I've previously stated thought this was a bad idea due to forces (moments really). I have though now come round to the idea considering my last post. With my last post, I basically had double the bed size in both the x and y planes due to boarders and structural components. This meant that there was lots of wasted space, which these other designs don't have as much of due to the z plane only having one side of the bed where its connected to the base. So I've designed the following two designs with this in mind. The first one is simpler but has a very large moment (as stated on the diagram) which cause cause inaccuracies or failure. The second design takes a bit more care of this by using two bars for the z plane slide. It also as its drawn has the bed moving up and down as well as the head moving. This is because I drew the bed moving first as I was planning for that drawing but then as I drew the head and the top of the frame unconsciously drew the head moving in this plane as well and I couldn't be bothered fixing it. I'll analysis the two designs soon but probably not until after my exams now. This also means I'll stop working on designs in inventor until I decide on what I actually think will be good and sleek. Thankfully every thing I have done so far can be applied to these two designs too.
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| First design |
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| Second design |
