Z-Axis design question

I have a prusa clone built with 2020 extrusion that I'm upgrading.

One of the things I don't like is that the Z-axis motors are cantilevered on
acrylic attached to the top bar and flex out of square.

There are a number of ways to fix that, but it seems easy enough to mount
the motors solidly to the base like most other prusa clones and push the
x-axis up instead of pulling from the top. I wonder though why they didn't
do that in the first place. Is there any engineering reason (vibration
dampening, etc) for keeping the motors on top?

EDIT: I flipped the motors to the bottom. It's much more solid, but having
the carriage close to the motors makes it more important to have everything
square. That isn't a defect since it should be square anyway, but maybe the
original idea was to make it so anything close would appear to work, even if
the print quality suffered.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/23/2017 08:43PM by MockTurtle.

Nope,,, there’s no advantage of having the motors mounted topside,, just an experimentation with the design I guess,, if anything it would be a disadvantage because you need to make sure the top of the frame is a rock solid design,,, and then pulling the X Axis up would put more stress on the frame—if the frame was a rock solid design with no flex at all,,, then it wouldn’t matter if the motors were at the top or bottom--

If you really want to fix things nicely, put in a closed loop belt and drive both screws with one motor. That might be easier to do if the motor is mounted at the top.

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Ultra MegaMax Dominator 3D printer: [drmrehorst.blogspot.com]

or address the real issue and replace the acrylic with something better.