Tune your Shapeoko belts like Jaco Pastorius

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Or Geddy Lee? Les Claypool? Dave LaRue? John Myung? Whoever your favourite bass player is, anyhow.

If you grab an electric bass machine head/tuner, deepen the slot by about 2mm, and attach it to a bit of wood, then add a pin nut, you can make one if these sorts of things:

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Then you can attach it to your Shapeoko without modifying the machine at all:

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and tune up those belts… ie: tension them.

This is a rudimentary prototype, but it seems to work so far… I’ll keep checking to see if it keeps in tune as I use the machine :slight_smile:

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Haha… doubtful. it was cut out of a scrap of cherry on a bandsaw by eye :slight_smile:

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Genius!

And then if you go down that route, it is a moral obligation to use the “pluck the string and measure the tone” method for belt tensioning, obviously. With a Guitar tuner for extra points.

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A=415 here since it’s from my baroque lute.

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Now that is a nice bit of repurposing, a whole century old optimised design and manufacturing we can use to solve our problem here.

I like it.

We could probably do a hole in the steel plate and a front mount bracket too.

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Well,

Perhaps we should put stepper motors on the tuner heads so we can actually play the belts with $M commands in GCode? :wink:

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Guitar auto-tuners are a thing

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It won’t be long before someone says “have a look at this…”

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Interesting… Great minds think alike… I have made my own design CoreXY based drawing machine, 2 steppers for A and B (related to X and Y) movement, with one very long belt encompassing both steppers. The challenge of tensioning this came down in the end to using a guitar tensioning/tuner screw with a 20T toothed wheel instead of a winding post for a guitar string. Thread the belt by hand, ‘tune it up’ and the tension is achieved. The machine is 1.2m x 1.2m and hangs on any flat, vertical surface such as a window, and has a servo-actuated pen holder for pen-up and pen-down. Modified GRBL1.1 on an Arduino Uno to repurpose Z commands, silently cope with tool change if present in the .gcode etc.
Nice bit of lock-down fun - and all made on the ShapeOKO 3XL

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Just a bad copy.

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Then there’s Wintergarten… Doing the same thing in the real world. Playing 30000 Marbles - Marble Machine X #148 - YouTube

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