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.
