Sooo yeah I’m new to these parts, so I’m just swimming in ignorance: Why does the maslow cnc use a chain instead of a braided steel cable? On the surface, it seems to me that the lighter weight would decrease sag, be just as strong or stronger, be cheaper, and more readily available.
What am I missing here?
This thread has a lot of good discussion about using cables vs. chains. The biggest challenge is the mechanism for measuring the amount of cable that is released or pulled per revolution of the motor. If stored on the motor spool the diameter of cable increases as the cable bundle grows, and for other ways to measure the length it takes some additional consideration. It’s doable and it sounds likely to be where the next generation maslow is heading but is still a work in progress.
As Matt said, it’s the ease of accurately feeding out the right amount
braided steel cable has less sag, but more stretch, so it’s not clear that it’s
going to be a win fro the calculation point of view, even if the feed problems
are solved.
Remember, with the accuracy we are looking for, the difference in how much is
fed out between a cable that’s on the spool vs one that’s on a layer of cable on
the spool exceeds the allowable error. we need to be accurate to ~0.1mm when
feeding out 3m of line. To put this in perspective, that’s more accurate than
your tape measure
a top-of-the-line tape measure (class 1) will be ±0.4mm @3m, a class 2 tape
measure will be ±0.9mm @3m, your normal tape measure doesn’t claim to even be
this accurate.
David Lang