[gavztheouch]

Hi,

I have a small A3 sized router from marchant dice in the UK. It has been great for prototyping small parts and I am happy with most aspects of the machine.

It does have one majour fault in the design and that is there are no thrust bearings preventing the ballscrew moving under load. There is a solid coupling from ballscrew to stepper and the stepper is meant to act as a thrust bearing. Steppers ain't designed for this, in fact you can pull and push the shaft of most steppers and they will easily move 1mm or so with little force.

Adding thrust bearings to the machine is going to be costly, so are there any alternative, ie steppers with built in thrust bearings?

Below is the pic of the current setup.

Cheers

Gav

The alternative would be to sell the machine and buy something more substantial.

[ger21]

Extend the ballscrew with a rigid coupler, and mount a thrust bearing where the stepper is. Mount the stepper to the thrust bearing assembly housing.