Leadscrew upgrade for Mendel90 Sturdy variant

thingiverse

I made this replacement pair of x-motor and x-idler brackets for use with T8 leadscrews and 4-hole anti-backlash nuts because the STLs I found online were not quite what I needed. They were designed for different rod spacings, smaller leadscrews, or 3-hole nuts, and did not fit my printer and parts. I started with the original x-end.scad from the Mendel90 project on GitHub, adding a new property to the config file called Z_screw_type so that the same file could generate either set of parts. My intention was to make this work with all sorts of screws and nuts and all Mendel90 variants, but once I had it working with my own printer and leadscrews, I lost motivation to finish the project as I still had many other upgrades I wanted to design. I hope to come back to this project later for now I will share what I have in case anyone else is looking to upgrade their Mendel90-Sturdy. The modified scad file is included so you may try it with custom Mendel90 configurations. It might work, or perhaps someone would like to continue this work. For anyone who has a Mendel90-Sturdy and wants to replace the threaded rods with leadscrews, the included STL files should work nicely. Even when configured for leadscrews, these brackets still have the nut trap for the standard nut, which could be used as a universal design for both. The visible horizontal banding on the part in the photo is not due to a design flaw; it was caused by a crack in my original x-motor bracket, which caused the brass nut to move in and out during printing. It was this banding that led me to decide it was time for the leadscrew upgrade. I replaced my threaded rods with leadscrews because I wanted to improve my print quality. However, I must admit that I have not seen a huge increase in print quality since the change. Nophead wrote in his blog that with the weight of the Wades extruder and a big motor, backlash isn't really an issue even with a simple nut and a regular threaded rod. Leadscrews can be moved faster than ordinary threaded rods. But speed on the Z-axis doesn't count for much during printing since it only has to move once per layer. Here's where leadscrews really shine: homing speed. Waiting for the carriage to travel from the bed to home and back to the bed used to take forever with ordinary threaded rod. Leadscrews may have saved my marriage by reducing the time I spend waiting for prints to start. So, get a pair yourself, print this adapter, and save yours too. This design was based on: The Mendel90 RepRap by nophead.