A1 Mechanical Assembly
My workspace is in the basement. I've got at least one bad disk in my back. Getting a 69 lb package from my front door down to the basement was going to be a problem. Fortunately, I remembered I had a folding luggage cart tucked away in the basement.Here's the A1 box in my garage where I had Fedex leave it. I figured I could unpack it there and take the parts down separately if the luggage cart didn't work out. |
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Fortunately the
cart, undersized as it was, worked! So this is what you see when you first open the box! |
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Under all that foam is the Y-table and a small cardboard carton that contains your heat spreader and boro glass. And another big box! |
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More Packing material! Note that I've cut away the outer box to be able to get at the inner. Still too heavy to lift. |
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That's the base of the A1. Be Careful lifting the base! |
The base is cabled to the x-carriage packed below! TL: Area for improvement - use connectors here |
what's left in the box after you remove the base is the gantry, fiber, and a bunch of small wrapped packages. I moved all of that to the table and put the packing material back in the box. |
In addition to all the wrapped stuff, there were also some unexpected loose items! First step, identify where they came from. |
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the small piece of metal turns out to be the lever arm from the X-axis end stop |
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Fortunately, it just snapped back into place. TL: Area for improvement - wrapping to protect the switch |
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The plastic part was one of the mounting posts for the RAMPS electronics package. TL: Area for improvement - two posts are not enough to hold the electronics Right: I noticed the braided tube was starting to unravel so I put a tie-wrap on it. |
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I also replaced the wire "twist tie" with a plastic tie-wrap. Personal preference. Right: one of the potential places for the loose hardware to have come from. Others follow. |
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My big concern now, having found at least 3 places where hardware is missing is where are the other loose items? |
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Some final housekeeping. Left: I cut off the end of the ty-wrap that decided to make an appearance where it didn't belong. Above: I added a bolt to hold this nut in place. The nut appears to be an extra, but It was making noise as I was shaking the frame to see if there was any loose parts trapped inside either a power supply or the RAMPS. |
note the pencil marks for the spacing on the captive nuts |
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Here's the gantry installed on the base. It's not easy to see at left, but in the picture above that's the bolt heads you are seeing. If you zoom in (150%) on the picture on the bottom of page 14 you'll see that it should be the the other way around. TL: Area for improvement - include a closeup pix so it's obvious which way the X-ends should be facing. |
The
method I'm going to use is to spray a light
coating of soapy water on the glass. I didn't have any baby shampoo but dish detergent (just a drop!) worked fine. Before you start clean the surface you are going to attach the heater of all fingerprints that might prevent it from sticking. | |
The soap film allows you to slide the heater around until you like the position. | When you start out applying the heater only fold back a small portion of the mask. Not having done this before, I didn't have enough soap film on the heat spreader and the Kapton film stuck when it should not have. |
Move the heater around until it's centered on the heat spreader! | |
Working from the center out to the edges, squeegee out the excess water. | Once the water is removed you can also use a wallpaper seam roller (if you have one) to press the heater down. Don't roll over the thermistor! |
This set of pictures look almost exactly like the ones in step 8 above, except now the X-ends are turned around and facing the correct direction! |
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At this point I've got the X-carriage
attached. TL: Area for improvement - I've got the X-carriage cables threaded inside of the smooth rod. There's no clear picture of where those cables go. I thought the pg33 instructions to use the Nylon clip (pictured on pg32) was for these cables, now I realize it's for the extruder cables. The cable routing for both needs improvement. You can just make out some blue painters tape on the top edge of the X-carriage. It's where the end-stop cable runs. At the left end it's held in by the bolt end of a nylon cable clamp. The other end was most likely held in by the one that came loose during shipping. I couldn't manage to work it back in place so I used tape for now. |
The close-up (left) shows the switch mounted
and installed. The picture in the instructions is taken from the back of the A1. TL: Area for improvement - Only the Aluminatus Trinity One Assembly 2003-06.pdf has the instructions for installing the bolt on the X-end that is positioned to trigger the limit switch and is used to set up your Z-height. |
This was the extent of my Metric toolset. I has to use the hex keys for the places the screwdriver could not fit. |
Most of the bolts here are inaccessible. |
If the Anti Backlash nut were rotated 60 degrees you might be able to get to all of the bolts. |
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Left: the upper bolt for the coupler is almost hidden. Or, my coupler is mounted up too high. Can't tell which. |
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