Anyone else dropped it, or is it just me?

[wobo]

Well, I had the brilliant idea to take a piece of 1/4 wire and pop into a 1/4 whole in the middle of my waste board while I performed my second, (second?) yes, what would have been my second successful calibration, when suddenly, with 2 belts in my hands, the sled slipped off of the 1/4 wire and gently glided down to a rest on the concrete floor. Well it didn’t quite happen that way. More of a crashing to the concrete floor, and breaking sound, but it’s a glass half full kinda day.

I was so close to my first cut, but then when I went to actually do my first cut, following my first calibration, it told me that it didn’t know the length of the belts, and I needed to do my calibration. Perhaps I didn’t press save or something? I’ll have to review that section again.

As I was saying, so close to my first cut, love this device, and so want to recommend a few improvements for the shop! I’m disappointed that it did break so readily. I know new parts are available but I’m overseas so that takes weeks and additional shipping taxes and duty.

Polyoxymethylene is a thermoplastic so I should be able to melt it with my soldering iron, but it’s proven very difficult to glue with the loctite along the edge, and I’m not confident it’s going to hold. It really called for just one good shot at it, but there’s no full planar surface to allow me to rest it on, so the first couple of times I sort of held/rested it on a piece of glass on the table, and when I realized it had set completely wrong, I pulled it apart and redid it… a few times.

I’m not convinced this is the right material, given it’s brittleness. or perhaps it needs a sort of light-weight bouncy cage around the whole thing, or protective overmolded abs or hips or other rubbed plastic, or a simple cable from the ceiling I think I saw someone do with the original Maslow, or just a less clumsy operator. All part of the journey and learning.

At any rate, it is all part of the journey and learning, and so I offer these initial photos for your consumption, as soon as I discover how to upload them for the first time, so that if you decide to perhaps design a more rugged version you will be able to take note of my experience.

Broke into 3 main pieces with at least 3 more smaller fragments.

[dlang]

wobo wrote:

I was so close to my first cut, but then when I went to actually do my first
cut, following my first calibration, it told me that it didn’t know the length
of the belts, and I needed to do my calibration. Perhaps I didn’t press save
or something? I’ll have to review that section again.

you need to fully retract the belts after you power on, then extend them, hook
up to the frame, and apply tension.

At any rate, it is all part of the journey and learning, and so I offer
these initial photos for your consumption, as soon as I discover how to upload
them for the first time, so that if you decide to perhaps design a more rugged
version you will be able to take note of my experience.

once we see the pictures we can comment on what it takes to fix/work around the
breaks

I also dropped mine, but it only broke one of the towers around a lead screw, so
I just am leaving that out.

David Lang

[wobo]

Thanks @dlang.

I had actually done that already for my first calibration, but you are correct. In this case, after first extending Top Left/Right, I should have hooked those first and then proceeded to extend the bottom belts. It was when I was tweaking the belt ends to extend the bottom belts, with the top belts already extended and just cascading down to the floor, that with the bottom belt ends probably only between my thumb and index, the collet slipped off of my mount because of my force applied to tweaking the belt ends to extend the belts, and since it was just between my fingers, the sudden weight caused it to fall from around 4 ft or so.

You’re fortunate that it wasn’t a major break you had. This is a little more than I was hoping for, but my fault

[bar]

I agree that we can work to make it all more compact and durable. There’s a tradeoff between flexibility and rigidity and we want to keep things rigid so there isn’t too much flex in the system, but that does make things more brittle. Overall I think that you are 100% right that we can work to make it more drop-proof!