Hi !
A while ago I contacted Barton Bring from the Makerslide project about Contrapteur ( 20mm Contraptor clone ), and this morning I received a few of the wheels in advance in the mail. Thanks !
The wheels look very nice. The bearings fit so well that I was not able to remove them for the picture.
So the plan for today is to find ways to get Makerslide and Contrapteur to work together.
I don't have the Makerslide rail ( yet ). This would work out of the box with Contrapteur ( also 20mm based ), and I'll try it as soon as the Kickstarter reward gets here.
Second option would be to make a rail specific to Contrapteur, like this :
That should work well, and I'll try it soon ( diagonal lasercutting ! ), but I needed something simpler for today. I went for the "angle as rail" option Contraptor uses for the sliding element.
There are two options here : the wheels in a diagonal plane and the angle in the "normal" plane, or the angle in a diagonal plane and the wheels in the "normal" plane. Chose the first one here, but I'd like to try the other one too.
First part is a mount for the wheels, lasercut in 4mm acrylic :
The bending was made with a hot air SMD station. Here is how it looks when sliding on a rail ( contrapteur angle ) :
It slides very well. Here is a video.
It is very smooth, even better than the Contraptor linear rail, and much much easier to assemble.
The fact that the part is lasercut allows to make it the exact dimension to fit the angle, so there was not even any adjustment required ( also my brain refuses to understand how the Makerslide eccentric spacers work … ) it worked the first time after assembly.
So now we have two sliding elements on two separate rails, but the goal here was to have a single carriage.
Because the bending is made by hand, it is not possible to know exactly it's exact position in the part ( with my current bending skills, it would be different at each bending ), so the distance between the two parts can vary, so it's not possible to make a part with holes that would fit them exactly for sure.
Here is the solution I came up with :
The "long holes" allow to connect the two parts together even without knowing how further apart they are.
Once assembled it looks like this :
And a video of it sliding :
This works surprisingly well ! The carriage is very sturdy, the sliding very smooth and silent.
Makerslide is awesome, plus it's opensource, plus it's awesome !
Plus it's cheap.
Plus it's 20mm based.
I can't wait to play more with it ( next thing will probably test having the angle at a diagonal and the wheels in the normal plane ).
EDIT : Spent all the rest of the day trying to lasercut rails for it : diagonal lasercutting is veeeery difficult ! Finally got one rail right, see pics below :
It works quite well, the wheels slide well and it seems sturdy.
But it's a lot of work to make : the lasercutter must be ajusted at the 1/10mm, the diagonal support was a lot of work, and even thenit takes several tries to get a rail right. Getting better at it thought.
Tomorrow I'll try to make another one, and use the two to support a carriage.