XXL Aluminum Baseboard

Well, I flipped the Y-carriage plates so that the motors are in front of the gantry now. Phil Thien did a pretty good write-up on it here so I am not going to re-hash it, but I did make and print a template for drilling the new belt clip. Here is the location of the two templates. The template is for making sure your printer printed it correctly. It is thin and has the correct sized holes in the correct locations (as best as I could get). The jig has a large hole where the new hole is to be drilled to that a drill bushing can be installed to guide the drill bit. They are in SolidWorks format, STL and STEP formats. This bushing is what I sized the hole for, since I had a bunch of them laying around. It is a bit bigger than needed, but I justified my impatience with the fact that the HDZ uses slightly wider V-wheels and I needed the clearance to keep the wheels from hitting the belt clip.

And now, to the pics…

With the flip, I am unable to use all 4 of the mounting locations for the stepper. I’m sure it’ll be fine with only 3. I have the other one out only for the drill jig and template.

Here is the template to make sure the dimensions are correct and that my printer printed it the correct size.

Here is the jig that has the drill bushing. The template and jig have a lip that indexes on the top of the plate and the left side of the plate as we are looking at it.

Here is the first side I drilled. The jig shifted just slightly, so the hole is off just a bit, but well within the original hole location.

Here is the second hole. I did a better job of holding the jig in place. I used a Vise Grip clamp, but the PLA is very slippery, and I guess on the first one the drill bit caught one side first and rotated the jig just a bit.

Here is the McMaster parts list for the fasteners and spacers. You can use the metric spacers, but they cost 2.5x as much as the SAE spacers, and they do the same job.

I should also mention (since you probably noticed it in the first picture) I removed the PEM nuts, because they are now on the wrong side of the plate. I’m not sure if they are re-usable, but I now have 8 of them in a bag, waiting for use or disposal.