From what he’s said, the ballscrews seem to be among the most impactful, though I think the linear rails on Z are a big deal too.
I’ll try out some new workholding tomorrow though. The thing that makes me hopeful is that the 1.5mm cut had a decent chunk of time where everything was calm and the 1.5mm cut was only taking ~2.1A. If the issues were due to an inherent flaw in the frame, they should have been persistent throughout the entire cut, but they weren’t.
So I’ll try throwing a bunch of clamps at it, which should make it much harder to lift out.
The other thing that makes me hopeful is that at 1.5mm, if I’m still only using 2.1A, that’s only 50W, so I’ve still got quite a bit of headroom, especially given that 1.2mm was 2A. If things are linear, 0.1A bought me 0.3mm depth and I’ve still got 0.9A left, which could mean an extra 2.7mm, for a total depth of 4.2mm.
At 4.2mm, it’d actually be doing what Millalyzer claims takes 48W, which would be a big efficiency improvement on the numbers I’ve seen so far.
Of course, I have serious doubts that the machine will be able to do that. I suspect it won’t be rigid enough, but I can dream.
Anyhow, I think I’ll try following in Vince’s footsteps and add ballscrews to all axes and linear rails to the Z-axis. That ultimately shouldn’t be too big a project:
- Adapter plates for the ballscrew nuts
- 4 precision milled but small plates for the Z-axis:
- One plate flush against the X-axis carriage with the linear rails attached
- Two plates that screw into the top and bottom of the X-axis carriage as well as the top and bottom of the plate with rails
- One plate to hold the actual spindle, attached to the linear rail carriages
- Something to attach the Z-axis to the ballscrew nut
@Vince.Fab can you share any details about your ballscrew nut adapters You said they were “close”. Do you think it’ll be any real trouble for me to machine? Did you make them from Aluminium or steel?