Right. That’s the one I’m referring to. First (fixed mirror by the tube), Second (on the gantry), Third (the head). It’s not just that it might be bent though (I’m not sure it needs much of a tweak), it’s that the whole thing needs to come up about half a centimeter. Though it might be off of 90 enough to make it feel like it needs to come up that much.
At least the gantry itself is level and within 1mm of perfectly square (from what I can tell anyway).
I pulled off the mount a while back and was working adding on a vertically-adjustable mount made from a piece of scrap linear rail I had lying around. So I’ll have to remove that and reattach the mirror to resume my alignment fight. I’ll try and get it back to ‘stock’ soon so I can try align it again.
And if I haven’t said it, if I come off grumpy, I’m just frustrated at the problem (and my inability to solve it), certainly not at you guys. I’m beyond grateful for the assist.
Its easy for me to say but I think something is fundamentally off. I don’t remember clearly but I think I opened up the slots in my 2cnd mirror mount.
I know you have probably heard this multiple times. My experience with others revealed that machines that are hard to align have a misalignment of the tube and beam coming from the 1st mirror. If it is not parallel with the gantry your 2cnd and 3rd mirrors are hard or impossible to align.
I started to work on a system that would make the beam parallelism visible in 3D.
The problem is that in most alignment schemes you really cannot tell if the beam is exiting the 1st mirror parallel to the carriage. As you say its hard to see it in 3 dimensions.
I had an idea to use multiple targets aligned to a bench on the carriages plane. The initial experiments are here:
This experiment was done with a metal plate but I planned to make acrylic stanchions that sat on the Y frame holding targets. This would provide multiple measurement points along the Y which would unequivocally show if the beam was coming out of mirror 1 parallel to the Y all the way to mirror 2. The same technique would show you if the beam stayed parallel to the x all the way to mirror 3.
I never got the chance to make the acrylic stanchions but I thought the theory of this technique might be helpful to you or give you some new ideas.
I double Don. The x and y axis bouild a plane. It could be impossible to correctly align the mirrors if the tube is not in the same plane.
I had to shim the tube at one end for about 1mm.
a while back I designed this as a replacement gantry and tube mount system for the K40. The idea is to cut out the metal compartment holding the tube now, but otherwise leave the chassis alone. that creates the space to drop in this assembly within the existing space. One of the goals of that design was to ensure the tube and all mirrors are on the same plane, by the very nature of the design. In theory it should really help solve that problem, but the build with the motors will cost several hundred dollars, so I’ve held off out of frustration, mainly.