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First thrust plate for a printable stepper motor milledTuesday, February 10. 2009In which your narrator turns plans into product...
I'd like to say that milling things has gotten to be routine. It isn't quite yet, though it's a lot more routine than it was six months ago. I was milling the thrust plate for my pneumatic stepper motor and had got about 75% of the way through when I decided that I needed to take a few video clips and snapshots of the thing taking shape. Things went well until while taking a last set of shots the strap on the camera got snagged on the corner of the xy milling table without me noticing. When I stood up for a final shot the strap pulled the milling table off it's tracks and the end mill started chewing through the thrust plate at an alarming rate. I'm taking that damned strap off of the camera! I set up another milling job during lunch and a few hours later it had finished out pretty much without incident.
I gave the thrust plate a quick test with a crudely-made thrust piston consisting of a scrap of HDPE and a #4 bolt. When Vimeo finishes uploading a short video clip of that little adventure in a few hours, I'll include it in this blog entry. It misses a few steps. That was a result of my equipment, however, not the design per se. I may want to redesign this thing for a shorter thrust distance. The next task will be to design and mill a proper piston and thrust shaft and get this whole prototype working on compressed air.
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Nice. I can't wait to see the result.
"Aside from getting up every ten minutes or so and blowing the swarf out of the cut, that is increasingly turning out not to be the case. "
Offbeat suggestion: Use one of those cheap auto-dispensing air-fresheners, but loaded with a can of dust-off. They can usually be set to 15 minutes, or you could hack it to work off a relay, etc.
An even better solution is to just set up a narrow tube to blow air from your compressor onto the work piece. A lot of scroll saws already use this idea to clear sawdust from wood being cut.
i have gone through some of your work, and im still baffled as to how you are going to get it to reverse. how are you going to do that?
In the original design, two-way stepping was provided for by having two different back and forth movements, ie from point 1 to 2 or point 2 to 3. This is a one-way implementation.
Ah! I thought I'd explained. While the Tigertaler design has paths for both directions on the same side, one above the other, my design has a mirror image of the path that you can see in the photograph on the opposite side of the thrust plate. The direction of stepping is determined by which side is engaged.
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