Due to limited space, we decided to mount our machine sideways, on the wall, tilted at a 5° angle.
Thanks to Avid for providing the cad model which was indispensable for undertaking this project!
We decided to mount it directly to the brick wall, having no leg supports.
with this in mind I designed some brackets out of 1/4" steel which we had laser cut and bent at a local shop.
We through-bolted the brackets to the CNC frame using 1/2" bolts, and also laser cut a drilling jig to position the the holes precisely for the slots on our brackets. The drilling jig was mounted to the frame using the 80/20 T slots.
The brackets had slots which were intended to give some play and adjustability of the machine during mounting, but ultimately due to how many brackets there were, it wasn’t really necessary or even possible (if I recall) to adjust the position once everything was fastened in place.
To mount the system, we did a bit of a dance with mounting the brackets to the machine, holding it up against the wall with a material lift, leveling it, then drilling the accessible mounting holes into the bricks and setting as many anchors as we could, then removing the frame from the brackets and finishing the rest of the anchors, before re-mounting the frame to the brackets.
We placed a thin neoprene sheet underneath each bracket to even out the variations in the brick surface and to provide a bit of squish when approaching our torque values for the anchors.
We initially played around with a few configurations of the dust hose which didn’t work so well.
Some early versions of 3d printed hose brackets to secure the hose:
before settling on an under-mounted system
During testing we found that the X axis motor system did not like having to support it’s own weight, as expected! Partly due to this and some other setup issues we were having lost steps and motor stall.
To overcome this after a bunch of strategizing we found a constant force spring from McMaster that was both long enough and close to being strong enough to counteract the weight we measured (about 50-60 lb) of the X axis falling under it’s own weight.
We looked at using a tool balancer to do this but due to expense and lack of existing things to mount it to we liked the simplicity of the spring (more on this later). I subsequently found this spring from Framing Tech which looks like it would have been even better.
The way this system works is the constant force spring is wound onto a pallet jack wheel which is mounted underneath the Y axis, routes up along the backside (relative to the operator) of the Y axis, connected to a cable which routes up and over the Y axis to pull the X axis upward. The reason we did this instead of just mounting the spring on top of the Y axis and extending directly down, which would have been simpler, was fear of the spring breaking while someone was nearby, and there was no way to enclose the track with Z channel on that side of the machine without obstructing the X axis movement.
Extending the spring to be able to wind it onto the roller! this was fun. Using ratchet straps we extended the spring and progressively clamped it to a 2x4, then introducing our pallet jack wheel and progressively undoing the clamps and releasing the ratchet straps.
We sandwiched the tip of the spring between some plates to straighten it out to help it feed into our channel better
Mounting the Z channel required us to offset the cable track that runs up along the Y axis, which wasn’t that bad, and we also later rotated the other cable track on top of the machine 90° so it was laying flat with regards to gravity which made it work a lot nicer.
Over all this entirely solved our problem with the vertical mounting and we have been operating like this for about 2 years with no real issues!
We subsequently made another version of this same setup, but instead of mounting it on the wall directly, due to the space, we built vertical leg frame. I’ll make a separate post about this.
