LTT ILS-3 Retrofit

[Gene Uselman]

Ahhh- thanks, I thought I had finally drifted over the edge.

[James Neiheisel]

Gene,
Thanks for the suggestion on the labeler I ended up picking up the PT-E105. Which appears to be similar to what you recommended but also specific for cable wrapping. It was like $39 at Home Depot. Worked pretty well.

Panel is pretty much done and installed. Had an unfortunate mishap where I got a bit to excited and soldered the header connector for my limit switch backward. Ended up reverse powering the x-axis limit switch and blew out the Omron optical end stop….

Y-axis still works and is homing. Have to order a replacement for the x.

Have to design some tube mounts next, I don’t like the ones I ordered from cloud ray, at least not for mounting them sideways…

[James Neiheisel]

While waiting on a replacement optical end switch to arrive, I started working on tube mounting.

The Machine was originally equipped with an air cooled rf tube. So I have to come up with a mounting solution.
When I bought the Cloudray glass tube for it, I also bought a set of their adjustable tube mounts. I don't really like the mounts, especially since I'm going to be mounting these to a vertical plate.

The plate for mounting the tube has a large selection of machined dowel pin, and threaded screw holes. So i selected a few to use for each mount, measure their location to each other and relative location to center-line of the tube and modeled a simple block shaped mount.

For not much reasoning besides wanting to try it, and thinking it looked cool, I meshed the part in FEA, added constraints and loading conditions, and let the analysis run.

After I had results from the FEA, I ran that through topology optimization, which removes any material that isn't necessary for supporting the load conditions and leaves a part that looks like some kind of alien skeleton.

After that its as simple as outputting the optimized mesh, saving it as an STL, slicing and printing...


The results are what may be the worlds most over-engineered laser tube mounts, that mostly just look cool, even though they'll be covered by machine panels and never seen.....

A few notes:

1.I did not design these with adjustment built in. The plate they're mounting too is 13mm thick machined aluminum, that is bolted directly to the gantry, so I'm fairly confident it will be square without much adjustment needed. I also modeled the surfaces that clamp onto the tube to have about 2mm larger diameter to allow shimming for minor adjustment.


2. FEA and TO is not really as simple as loading up a 3d model and pushing play. I took a lot of stress/strain analysis classes in school as well as entire classes devoted to FEA. There's a lot of validation involved, and I mostly did this for fun.

[James Neiheisel]

Here’s the pics.

[James Neiheisel]

And more pics

[Eric Fletcher]

so you wouldn't want to sare that amazing 6445 pod mount???? I would LOVE that unit

[James Neiheisel]

Unfortunately I corrupted the original Solidworks file and would have to model it over from scratch. I may have the STL for printing, but it had a few issues, I ended up up needing to use a dremel to tweak the fit. If you want it I can probably send it over, but print it at your own risk. I meant to adjust it to perfection and release it. Maybe one day I’ll have the time and model it over with some upgrades.