Ultimaker style gantry & linear rails?

I have been following the Ultimaker and Zortrax for some time and noticed quite good prints consistently coming from both. Each appears to have a well built Z which obviously helps with layer alignment but I also believe there may be something to the gantry. Now the Zortrax went with a dual linear rod for each axis but I have been wondering, what about a MGN9 or 12 linear rail for each axis?

Has this been tried and failed for some reason I cannot see? Bolting the two MGN carriages together and creating a mount tor the hotend would be fairly strait forward and I would start by using regular 8mm linear rod for the belt carriage slides.

Sounds interesting, could you model it in cad first, see what it looks like? My only reservation is whilst this gantry system keeps the motors off the axes, you're using 6 linear rails, if I visualise it right, 4 at the sides and the two going across the plane of the gantry. Why not build a corexy and use 3 rails? Or 4 if you don't want to cantilever the head from the x rail? If not for the cost then how about just reducing the moving mass?

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/12/2017 03:37PM by DjDemonD.

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Simon Khoury

Co-founder of [www.precisionpiezo.co.uk] Accurate, repeatable, versatile Z-Probes
Published:Inventions