When you are a machinist, your stock in trade is precision, with measurements in the thousandths of your most popular unit currently being typical. But when you are a diemaker, your precision video game desires to be even finer, and remaining ready to position tools and material with seemingly impossibly granularity becomes seriously significant.
For [Adam Demuth], aka “Adam the Machinist” on YouTube, the require for extremely-high-quality resolution machinist’s jacks that wouldn’t crack the lender led to a structure applying off-the-shelf components and some 3D printed components. The structure centers about an inch-metric thread adapter that you can decide up from McMaster-Carr. The female thread on the adapter is an M8-1.25, though the male aspect is a 5/8″-16 thread. The pitches of these threads are very near to each individual other — only .0063″, or 161 microns. To acquire benefit of this, [Adam] printed a cage with compliant system springs the cage holds the threaded areas alongside one another and give axial preload to take out backlash, and enables mounting of precision metal balls at each and every conclude to make confident the pressure of the jack is transmitted by a solitary stage at each individual close. Each individual total flip of the jack moves the finishes by the pitch distinction, major to extremely-good resolution positioning. Want even more precision? Attempt an M5 to 10-32 adapter for about 6 microns for every revolution!
Whilst we have found diverse thread pitches applied for great positioning right before, [Adam]’s solution desires to machining. And as beneficial as these jacks are on their personal, [Adam] stepped factors up by applying a few of them to make a kinematic base, which is finely adjustable in a few axes. It’s not pretty a nanopositioning Stewart platform, but you could see how introducing three more jacks and some actuators could make that occur.
