Kossel Mini spring-string effector and carriage

youmagine

I liked AndyCart's spring-string design for his Cherry Pi a lot so I adapted it for my enlarged Kossel Mini. I tried magnet-based designs before but didn't like the failure mode where large accelerations or blocking of the hotend causes the magnet bond to break, leaving the hotend limping around in a puddle of molten plastic for as long as the print remains. There are provisions for using the hotend as Z-probe, a 50mm radial fan and a 70mm LED ring. An E3Dv6 fits just about perfect. I modified the switch actuator's height such that ~0.4mm lift of the switch end of the hotend mount trips the switch. This way the hotend doesn't have to rotate and lift too much, dragging its tip across the build plate. The carriages use a MGN-12H interface and the GT2 belts are self-locking. For the springs I used the ones from my desk-lamp together with 100lbs Spectra line. Now my desk lamp falls down :-/. The springs apply about 14N of pull which although an arbitrary number seems to work okay. The springs for the Z=probe I had laying around, I don't think they are very critical. For the arms I glued the 10mm hardened steel ball bearings to the ball bearing adapters first using slow-curing epoxy. After that I glued the assemblies on the 8mm carbon rods. So far this has worked fine: the load on the ball bearings is mostly compression anyway so the glue isn't stressed too much. I use a jig for this that consists of two parallel beams set at the distance you want for the arms + one ball bearing diameter. This way I get them within ~30 micron. For the supplied configuration; DELTA_EFFECTOR_OFFSET = 35.15mm DELTA_CARRIAGE_OFFSET = 38.7mm Print settings: - at least 1.2mm perimeter, <=0.1mm layer height and >=60% infill for effector and carriages - at least 0.7mm perimeter, <=0.2mm layer height and >=20% infill for the rest Parametric design files are included so you can adjust for your components