I have built the first of the Z skates for OverlapStrap.They can be tightened using the 4 M4x40 bolts, and when tightened just right they run very smoothly. I haven’t had a chance to upload any drawings of the parts that make it up yet.
This image gives you an idea of angles at which the bearings are arranged.
I have tried to make the chassis constrained the same way as it is in the original mendel, however I am relying on gravity to hold the chassis down so I only need 6 bearings in total for the chassis. Below is a picture of the chassis mounted to the OverlapStrap frame.
The main reason my plans for this repstrap deviate from the work being done by bodgeit was because he uses 606 bearings. I wanted to use the M4 bearings that are part of the Mendel Bill of materials. Instead I have made these skates inspired by those used in the build your cnc project.
The M4 bearings are mounted on 1/2″ x 1/2″ x 1/8″ Aluminium Equal Angle which I picked up from eBay
As usual the dxf files can be found here
A couple more drawings for the Z-Rail Mounts.
The upper mount
The lower mount
All Files can be downloaded here
So far all I have done is built the frame with Y and Z axes. All bars are the same lengths as in the original mendel. The wooden parts are made from 12mm x 32mm planed smooth timber.
The reprap software comes with rxtx and java3d binaries needed for 32bit architectures so getting the reprap software working on amd64 either means installing 32bit version of java or installing native 64bit versions of the libraries. I preferred the latter option here is how I did it.
sudo apt-get install libjava3d-jni
unzip Downloads/rxtx-2.2pre2-bins.zip
sudo cp rxtx-2.2pre2-bins/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/librxtxSerial.so /usr/lib
cd reprap-mendel-20100105 rm lib*.so ln -s /usr/lib/jni/libj3dcore-ogl.so ln -s /usr/lib/librxtxSerial.so
Inspired by Bodge-its Mendel Repstrap, I am building a repstrap which overlaps as much as possible with Mendels Bill of Materials. The idea being that I can print the needed 3d parts, with the repstrap, then dismantle the repstrap and build Mendel, without having to have bought lots of extra parts and materials.
