I received my Maslow4 kit last Thursday. Been working an hour or so every day since to get it assembled. I’m on the home stretch - incorporating the router itself.
Two areas where I’ve had quite a bit of difficulty:
First, I’m convinced that the injection molded arms are too small. There is zero, or maybe even negative lash in the gears. When I insert the idler shaft and the idler gear, it takes quite a push, and the idler shaft ends up appearing to lean away from the motor shaft. Then when I install the spool, it again takes a bit of force to get the gear teeth meshed and the spool on its hub. There simply isn’t enough clearance there. Also, the pockets for the idler shaft are an interference fit for the shaft. That’s totally unnecessary, as the shaft is contained on both ends, so there’s no need to have it that tight. The side pressure from the lack of gear lash tips the idler shaft, which also makes the fitting of the upper arm that much more difficult.
Did you not account for shrinkage as the injection molded parts cool off?
Second, the belts are delivered too long?? The assembly pictures show the belt ends drawn up right against the ends of the arms, but I have about two feet of excess belt when the spool is so full that the last winding is rubbing against the hub of the idler gear. Am I supposed to trim them?
With no gear lash, I’m fearing that the motors will stall immediately when I initiate the calibration routine, and certainly when I try to rettract the belts and the belt jams up against the idler long before it is fully retracted.
I agree, although I don’t think that it is an issue of shrinkage, at least not in the plastic molded parts. I am not 100% sure why those are as tight as they are, but I think that it might be the metal gears which might be slightly larger than the machined prototypes. It is something that I want to look into. I would also like to have more play there.
This one was actually very intentional, we had a lot of issues with that part failing early on, the force on that shaft can be quite large. The cast POM material of the production parts is much tougher than any material that we could prototype with so it might be OK, but at least in prototyping we found that that shaft needed to be an interference fit to distribute the load as much as possible to prevent it from failing there. We didn’t want to take a chance on changing that. It does make assembly a bit more difficult.
We shipped the absolute maximum about of belt that could fit to give you more flexibility. You can always cut it shorter, but you can’t add more. That being said I’ve always kept mine full length and it does all fit albeit the last couple of wraps aren’t the tidiest. Several, folks have cut theirs and reported that they like it better.
I finished the assembly tonight, and ran into another problem. Mea Culpa! When starting out and checking parts, I totally missed the note about three lengths of bolts. I saw the first instruction to find and separate the short bolts, but the long 16mm ones got thrown in with all the 12s. Only when I got to mounting the fan did I look for them, unsuccessfully. They must be buried in one of the subassemblies… Luckily, I was able to find some m3x20 in my picanut cabinet. I hope the extra length won’t short out something on the circuit board… I won’t find out until I build a frame and power it up to attempt a calibration .
Speaking of calibration, what will happen if my frame isn’t perfectly rectilinear? Can it deal with a parallelogram? How about an irregular quadrilateral?
I finished the assembly tonight, and ran into another problem. Mea Culpa!
When starting out and checking parts, I totally missed the note about three
lengths of bolts. I saw the first instruction to find and separate the short
bolts, but the long 16mm ones got thrown in with all the 12s. Only when I got
to mounting the fan did I look for them, unsuccessfully. They must be buried
in one of the subassemblies… Luckily, I was able to find some m3x20 in my
picanut cabinet. I hope the extra length won’t short out something on the
circuit board… I won’t find out until I build a frame and power it up to
attempt a calibration .
it should not be a problem, none of the screws go towards something that can
short out.
Speaking of calibration, what will happen if my frame isn’t perfectly rectilinear? Can it deal with a parallelogram? How about an irregular quadrilateral?