Adrian Bowyer awarded Knighthood!

I was reading a great tip today, Adrian Bowyer tweeted:

From wikpedia i get the following: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_British_Empire

”The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry, rewarding contributions to the arts and sciences, work with charitable and welfare organisations, and public service outside the Civil service.” ”..an Order to honour many thousands of those who had served in a variety of non-combatant roles..”

The BME is “Most Excellent Order of the British Empire”, the highest of 5 levels form of this order.

To add to that I would like to thank him for the great and inspiring work he did to make the RepRap project into the community it became, and enable it to grow in such different ways. I think we as a people have gained a lot from his help, and it sure was great meeting him during our course at the University. Also thanks to Rhys my great host, and all the amazing people I met during the trip over there. I still remember you fondly and often. (Strangely I never did a report about this great build party in Bath, and my other great adventures while there)

Reprap has taken me on wonderful trips of discovery and amazement, and has given me a lot of friends and experiences I would not like to have missed. A lot of you also deserve Knighthoods!

So thanks Adrian, keep up the good work! (are you a Sir now?)

Cartesio

Cartesio is a printed multi-purpose desktop CNC machine, with a working space of 300x200x100mm(X,Y,Z).
The machine is designed to hold multiple tools at its toolhead.
This way one could connect a mill and/or a 3Dprint extruder and/or ….

Cartesio is constructed from lightweight aluminium extruded profiles.
These give the machine a very rigid construction, and alow for easy configuration of the machine.
So if you want to change anything, i.g. the Z axis to a much longer configuration, it can be done very easily.

The axis are powered by 3 NEMA23 steppers.
These drive trapezoidal spindles that move 3mm per rotation.
With these spindles you can generate a huge amount of power.
The max feedrates, are 2400mm/min for X and Y, and 660mm/min for Z.

The workspace only moves in Z-axis direction, and is supported on all 4 sides.
This gives a very rigid workplane that does not move fast in X or Y direction.
This is done, so that larger objects will not have stress/torque from (de)acceleration.

The “gantry” type X and Y-axis make sure that a wide variaty of tools can be mounted to the toolholder.
This kind of setup can result in a toolchanger in the future.
At the moment a proxxon engraving tool (thankfully donated by Hegner) is mounted to the toolhead, together with the new 3Dprint Extruder.