Phew. It’s been a while!

As I mentioned earlier, I did some traveling and I also needed to do some projects around the house during summer, so there was hardly any time left to put into hobby projects. I already said it in my lathe post: life can get in the way sometimes… Moreover, I did a MAJOR overhaul of my Shapeoko so it has been out of commission for the last few months. But finally I’m back and the machine is up and running again. I’ll probably write about all the recent modifications over the course of the next few days, because honestly, it’s just too much to write down in one go.

First up: new motors!

Instead of the standard issue NEMA 17’s, I ordered 4 of the much bulkier 276 oz-in NEMA 23’s to drive my already stiffened machine. But it turned out not to be as easy as simply swapping them out.

First of all the lip around the shaft is larger in diameter compared to the one on NEMA 17 motors, so it wouldn’t fit in the hole of the motor mounting plates of the SO2. I could have bolted it on anyway but I really wanted as much heat dissipation surface as possible. Making the hole on the motor mounting plates larger seemed daunting, so I decided to make some spacers. I had to work with hand tools since my machine was broken down, and the result was unsurprisingly unsatisfying, as shown in the picture below:

But Ebay to the rescue! I found some stepper mounting plates intended for 3D printers. They were cheap and readily available, so I bought 3 of them (my Z-axis won’t need one).

I cut off the excess and saw that it was good. Especially compared to the ones I made earlier. And like that I can make full use of my motor mounting plates as heatsinks!

But that was only the first hurdle. The wider motors + spacers were partly covering the holes for the idlers, so I had to cut new holes, making sure they wouldn’t end up in the way of the V-wheels. It took some trial and error, but I got it right eventually.

Here’s the motor mounting plates completely assembled:

For the X-carriage, I also needed to replace 4 holes for the long spacing bolts (if you know what I mean). The pulleys and idlers are new, now accepting 9mm GT3 belts, which I will cover in my next post. Note that the motor shaft is also wider on my new motors so the old pulleys had become useless anyway.