***Progress Update! 4/15/17***

Not much to report at the moment. We had the dry run of our final Senior Design presentation this last Tuesday (4/11/17), and it went really well. Now to just survive these next three weeks...
We did get the enclosure painted and mounted to the frame, although it was more effort than we would have liked haha. The frame was just a little short in just about every dimension (2-3 mm at the most...) which wouldn't have been a problem had I not designed the enclosure to essentially mate perfectly at each edge. We ended up with some overlap that we had to deal with - oh well, something that I'll avoid for the next project!
And that just about finishes everything up I think.. there's a couple of finishing touched that we need to add, but otherwise we're really close. There's a couple of edits I need to make to the CAD files to bring those up to date, but hopefully that won't take to long.

Here's an image of me standing next to the machine. At this point we hadn't put the lid on it, but the awesome front panel was there!

 

Just wanted to let everyone know that I'm not dead haha! @andrewsejlv messaged me asking about the design files, and I wrote the below in reply. I decided to copy it here so that everyone knows the current state of the project. I'm not going to post the Solidworks files publicly yet since I don't feel like they're quite finished, but I would be more than happy to share them directly with anyone who wants them. Just message me and let me know!

"Hey Jon! Sorry that I never responded to your post in the thread - I kept meaning to get around to it, but between graduating and starting my job it's been a little crazy! I'd be more than happy to share the design files with you. I haven't had much time to play around with the laser cutter since school finished, but there's a couple things to watch out for:

#1: The Z-axis still sucks, haha. The current design doesn't quite reflect the final physical setup, but we ended up driving two opposite corners of the bed, and then putting 12mm hardened chrome plated rods on the other two corners with linear ball bearings on the bed. Still, it binds badly. I'd definitely recommend ditching what I've got in the SolidWorks design and just starting from scratch with the Z-axis. Where I went wrong here was that I thought I could get away with cheap 1/2" threaded rods since the Z-axis didn't need to be that precise. The issue is that the nuts are such a sloppy fit on the threads (compared to a proper leadscrew and nut combo) that there's enough play to get the entire thing to bind.

#2: The mounting of the X-axis Gantry isn't as rigid as it should be. Currently the X gantry is just bolted via some T-nuts to the linear carriages (although it appears that I didn't included that in the Solidworks drawing, even though I put pretty much every other bolt and T-nut in). Even though there's two bolts per carriage, you can still twist it and get the carriages offset from each other on their respective rails. This might not be an issue if you don't smack the gantry, but it definitely could be improved simply by modifying the brackets on either end of the X gantry to where they would extend down and bolt onto the carriages directly.

#3: Since I haven't tested it a ton, I don't know how good the ventilation layout is. This won't matter if you're not fully enclosing it, but I don't know what your plans there are. While I'm at it, another thing to watch out for is that the sheet metal panels are designed to fit *perfectly* onto the frame... assuming that you build the frame to the absolute perfect dimensions. I think I mentioned that we were a few mm short in each overall dimension, which led to problems with panel edges overlapping, etc.

Again, apologies for the lack of a response previously. I'll go ahead and copy this message reply into the main thread so that people don't think I died haha! Now that I'm settled I'll be much quicker with replying to questions."

 

Hey there! If you want the SolidWorks files, shoot me a message with your email address and I'll shoot them over. I unfortunately still haven't been able to do much work on the machine, but once I get a house (and a garage/workshop...) it's definitely something I'll get back to!

 

Just wanted to let people know that I'm not dead, just living in an apartment still... Really wish I had the space to work on this beast!