I quickly tired of screwing and unscrewing my Maslow belt ends from their anchors during the retract, extend, calibrate sequence and went looking for a better solution.
I have a horizontal setup on a flat concrete garage floor so drill in / drop in anchors were the obvious way to go. Naively I thought a simple 10mm bolt into these would do the job… nope. I quickly came to realise that you need to take the belts on and off the anchors. I’ve suffered through two dead z axis control boards, which failed after I had calibrated the machine.
So I was unscrewing the bolts a frustrating amount of times.
Thanks to the ‘not shop’ and the forums I could see a potentially better way by using a combination of the ‘Fancy Locking Pins’ and the ‘Triangle Anchor’ from the ‘not shop’ and ‘drop in anchors’ as described in the forums.
This required a new design modelled on the ‘triangle anchor’ but better suited to being firmly bolted to a drop in anchor on a concrete floor. I also needed them readily removable as the garage needs to be used for other things - or so I’m told
This is the somewhat satisfying result
Apologies for the poor framing of the video - I only had two hands and an old cardboard box to hold everything
The parts are simple and low cost
I got the pins and bolts from Ali Express at about $25 USD for a set of 4 of each delivered to here in Australia
Assembled they look like this
I was concerned the mount may move / pivot around the bolt into the floor under tension from the Maslow, but no, when the floor bolt is nipped up tight its solid and doesn’t move an iota.
You do need access to a 3d printer or 3d printing service and a few hours of print time per mount
With the large overhang you need to print with supports enagbled and have a few minutes of
clean up time when you are finished.
Of course this is just one of many ways to solve the same problem and I could have just used some threaded rod in the drop in anchors with a nut to lock in the rod
Next up is to experiment with lifting the mounts up off the floor to get the belts closer to horizontal, without compromising the firmness of the mount … and that will require another round of retract, extend, calibrate, but it will be so much easier to do without having to unscrew the bolts holding the belt ends.
Happy to share the shopping list, CAD model and 3D files if anyone wants them
-A
