Greetings, all. I am working through my first 3D printer design (fixed build plate, coreXY, rather on the large size) and Solidworks is telling me that my Z-axis belt (stepper driving 4 lead screws) will need a closed 6mm-wide GT2 belt in excess of 2400 mm. Now, I knew this was coming, so I have two questions: 1) Is there a supplier who can supply a very long GT2 closed loop? SDP-SI says that the longest they have is 2218mm. Can SDP-SI make them longer, or can someone else? 2) If answer to 1) is "no", is there a reliable way to splice GT2 belt? I know, everyone is shaking their heads sadly, mumbling "no way", but I have heard of good results with fine Kevlar thread (the kind used for tying flies). OK, I admit that where I heard this was YouTube, so maybe not the most reliable source of engineering... I do want this design to be scalable to a larger size. If long-ish closed runs of GT2 are not feasible, then I'm going to duplicate steppers and drivers on my four corners. Thanks in advance for any relevant info, Willie
I'm guessing you want one belt to drive all four corners. An alternative would be to have one belt drive two corners. Then connect the two sides with another belt. You would have three (or four if you want to connect every corner to two other corners) belts.
Yeah, I had come to the same conclusion a-week-and-a-half ago, and modified my design appropriately. I did come up with a way to splice GT2 belts reasonably reliably, but it required a custom jig and really wasn't worth the trouble. My current design will easily scale up to a build volume in excess of 1 meter^3 (if you can find true lead screws that long), so that is probably large enough.
