Hi guys,
I’m about to upgrade my laser head holder, can you guys suggest any printable set up to improve mine ( picture below) .
Looking forward for your advise.
Cheers
I would assume you could use any head, and design the mount for it.
I have one of heads designed by Russ Sadler on my machine… Probably the best upgrade…
If you’re interested, let me know and I’ll send you more information.
In my case I’m using v wheel on 2040 rail, I’m thinking to upgrade to linear rail but don’t want to spend more money on this specific build, the issue with the laser head support i’m using is that after few usage the weight of the laser head tend to bend it and no longer remain perpendicular to the bed which resulting in the beam cuting the material at an angle.
The next build I will use better set up but for now I just want more stable set up for this one
But sure I can adapt this one to my v wheel plates , but I don’t have cnc
I would think so. The mount I’m using now was cut on a co2 laser using acrylic.
This head weighs about 100g.
But from the picture I see that the piece that holds the laser head is metallic
The head is metallic.
Mount plate is acrylic, it’s frosted or colored… on the left it’s mounted by the three black screws, the head mounts to the other five locations you can see in the right photo.
Make sense?
Russ originally built this head out of acrylic… Might want to look at that…?
The issue I’m having now is that I cannot rely on the accuracy of the cut of my laser , I have one k40 sitting around but that’s another hassle 
, if you can share the file please I will try to adapt to 3d print because for now the only thing I can rely on for precision is my 3d printer
Can you identify specifically where it’s bending? If it’s pivoting at the wheels then there’s little you could do at the head that will fix.
Structurally I see some weaknesses in the current design.
- The head is sitting too far away from rail. Can you eliminate the component in yellow?
- The current support for the head is too thin and attached at a right angle to the yellow component.
- You’re missing support at the bottom of the head so the head is likely to start rotating towards the railing at the bottom as it sags
Can you make the entire head housing from a single light rigid body that’s fully supported and directly attached to the roller assembly?
The issue with this support is the part you marked with the blue, there is channel in the part you marked with yellow that allows me to move the head up and down when aligning the mirrors. The part in blue bends slightly over time because of the weight of the laser head (I attended a picture). That slight bend makes an important angle when cutting along the Y axis specially when cutting thick materials
Yes I can eliminate the part marked with yellow but not bring it close to the rail because of the second mirror plate (the laser head set is the standard cloudray ).
All the points you mentioned are valid and are the main issues with this support. I will try to convert the model @jkwilborn shared in the picture if I have the files because I think it solves all the issues
I don’t think Russ’s design will translate that well directly to 3D printing. You’d have to adjust in many ways. I believe at one point he made the design publicly available but not sure.
Seems to me that if you had a design that was fully supported for the length of the mounting plate that it would be sufficiently rigid.
His model can be a good starting point, would appreciate it if I can have a hand on
But I will try to have the support attached to the plate
Jack, is there an SVG or DXF file of that mount plate that you could share? I’m especially interested in the upper half where the air hose passes through.
That’s the one! Thanks Jack.
What program reads dxf.txt?
Remove the .txt