Hi,
It's been a while since I've been around these parts.
I just upgraded my Solsylva belt-drive table to where it hardly follows any of the plans (see attached pictures) I put on a new Z-carriage that I paid lots of good money for from K2CNC (and it works like a charm), upgraded the gantry to an 8020 aluminum extrusion, and upgraded the bearings to using the bearing blocks from CNCRouterparts.com
Everything is much more stiff and solid that before, however, I still get a fair amount of chatter, and it seems to happen when very much dust gets on the steel rails. Does anyone have any good ideas of what to do about this? I've wondered if I were using rack & pinion, would I have as much trouble? It seems like the dust that gets caked on to the bearings exerts more force than the belts can handle, and they stretch, causing chatter marks in my cuts. It hasn't been a real bad problem, but I would like to know if there is any solution to keeping the dust cleaned off the rails, so that everything rides smoothly.
Any good suggestions? On my next machine, I'm definitely going to be using something like the Hiwin linear rails, but I do want this one to work as well as possible without putting a lot more money into it. This machine has a cutting area of about 40" x 60", and I can jog it around all day long at 850+ IPM (could be faster if I was using a better computer.) Gotta love that Gecko G540.
Oh, and yes, that is a touch screen that my brother gave to me.