Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Makeshift Motor Pulley


So, I had time to work out another solution to my lack of a motor pulley.
I decided to build it around a rubber wheel-thing from a paper roller out of a printer that gave up its belts for the machine anyway. This means I no longer have to worry about much in the way of play on the attachment between pulley and motor.
It works pretty well, but I made an error when fusing the layers, and the two layers that constitute the toothed section are not aligned correctly, and the belt skips every 20 turns or so. I've managed to run the motor with an older reprap stepper driver (powered from a SCSI enclosure) and it works great, minus the skipping. The driver produced so much heat that I was afraid to burn it out by running for too long. The enclosure PSU is probably made for more demanding devices - its normal function is as a soldering station power supply with a few PC fans attached in series around the edge to suck away fumes.

I'll make another one tomorrow, and clamp it to dry with the belt attached.

1 comment:

  1. I should have consulted the wiki.
    The extra heat was a result of badly tuning the potentiometer.
    Whoops.

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