Pen Arm Slipping

mcwhorpj

I have the eggbot all together, and all the parts are talking to each other and working as they should.

I am having one problem. The pen arm is slipping. The pen arm is affixed to the pen stepper motor securely via the set screw. However, the wooden part itself slips around that coupling. The wood piece is not firmly affixed to the metal coupling that has the set screw. As the eggbot is drawing, motion of the pen stepper motor is not always translated to the pen because of the slippage between the metal coupling and the wood part. I hope this makes sense. Shouldn't the wood piece be more firmly affixed to that metal coupling? Mine is lose and leads to distorted pictures. Is there a reason that is not a tight/solid connection? Thanks for any advice. 

Windell Oskay

The shaft collar (the metal piece) is glued into the wooden part with superglue, and needs to not slip.  You can either get some super glue and add repair it yourself, or write to our shop using the contact form ( http://shop.evilmadscientist.com/contact ) to request a replacement.

mcwhorpj

Windell,

Thanks! I will repair myself. I just wanted to make sure it was not some sort of stress relief clutch or something. Now that I know it is supposed to be a solid connection I can fix. Thank you so much for your quick reply!

Blacky133

I believe this same issue was causing me problems immediately after I built my Egg-Bot. Once I completed the build, I hooked it up to my computer, and tried to start drawing via a sample Inkscape file. the pen arm would just flop to the side, and the pen head would just jump up and down. I don't know if I got more than one issue going on here. I will re attached the shaft collar to the wooden part, and hopefully this will fix the problem.

You mentioned super glue. Does it matter what type, thin, thick? Would epoxy be a better choice? 

I would love to give the grandson an Egg-Bot egg for Easter tomorrow. This is great fun!! ( Although I'm entertained easily).

patric

Same here. I think your superglue is not so super ;-) - now fixed! I took some epoxy style glue, after cleaning the metal part with alcohol.

Windell Oskay

We use thick, gap-filling super glue.  It generally works very well-- and this part does indeed work indefinitely --if applied correctly, but it sounds like there was a batch of them that was not assembled correctly.    

We'll look into this on our end, and see what we can do in our process to make sure that this doesn't happen any more.

emu

Hi. My pen arm is slipping too. As soon as I start the plot, it flops over to the side. The collar is solid in the wooden part is secure. The actual shaft of the motor is what's moving. It doesn't seem to be holding the weight of the arm up correctly. Any suggestions?

Windell Oskay

@emu: unrelated issue. Please adjust your motor current setting on the EBB, as described on the documentation page about "making your first plot."