First Question:
Is it advisable to drill out the bracket holes into the rail tubing and use screws into the tube? I assume this would increase the rigidity some as well as helping keep things more square as long as everything was already squared when they are installed?
Second Question:
How to eliminate squeaky wheels on Max side where rollers ride the rail?
I’ve tried a few approaches and not had much success. The min side is much, much quieter but max is noisy. Ways to remediate or improve?
Third Question:
What is the best way to help reduce the overall noise when the machine is sitting idle? Is this related to holding amps or other stepper motor configuration items? The noise being made is a humming sound - guessing this is due to the steppers having to lock in and ‘hold’ power to keep everything in place.
Any way to help address the noise? Of note, when turning on the led lightling via Mosfet, the noise is greatly reduced while the lights are on.
No. There is an option to do this, but unless you have exceptional alignment and fabrication skills it will make things worse, not better.
I haven’t run into this so I’m not sure.
You don’t.
That is the stepper drivers Applying the holding current to supply holding torque. You get rid of the noise by turning off the stepper drivers, which means you have ZERO holding torque.
That’s suspect. We may want to understand what your loads look like. You may be compromising your machine performance depending on how things are wired and what your controller is driving.
I had a feeling the screws were a bad idea for the reasons you outlined. I’ve seen the same issue in the past on an Ender 3 Pro that had guides on the lead screws. They’d get binding if everything wasn’t exactly perfect and since it was an Ender 3, nothing was ever perfect.
I’ll try to get a video showing the squeaky wheels. I’m thinking about the Unistrut mod for the min side - any thoughts on value/bang for the buck on that one?
I knew that was the cause of the steppers making noise holding torque but thought I had seen something on a thread here or over on the FluidNC forum that was talking about adjusting the holding current or stepping that would help quiet them down. It may be Mandela effect though as I haven’t been able to find the thread again since.
The only thing ‘extra’ on the Jackpot 1 is a 24v COB LED strip. I’ll do some more testing but I’m pretty sure that regardless of the power output level on the Mosfet, it seems to quiet things down. I’ll get more empirical data on this one too, but I imagine the load is fairly small and within the Mosfet range. It’s pretty much the same mod that Doug from Design8 posted about. I will get the data, the answer is always in the data.
I expect that all of these are ultimately DNS issues. It’s always DNS. (IT humor in effect).
My general recommendation is to build it stock first, get it running and in use. You’ll learn tons about what works well for you and you’ll have a list of things you want to improve/change to suit your use cases.
My suggestion is to get to that point stock and then (and only then) to go wild with mods.
Agreed. It’s all running currently just not getting a ton of use yet. The only mods so far are: LED lights, Wireless Probe and the AutoSpin T1. I guess you could technically include drag chains on that list as well.
It cuts well and all the struts were cut on it, Crown test and several other smaller projects all went great.
I’m in no hurry to do the Unistrut and was mainly more interested to hear the real-world results of that mod.
The other one that comes to mind is some sort of improvement for the limit switches. I’ve knocked the arm off several of them more than once.