Vacuum table
Description
This is a vacuum table to hold photographic prints flat while copying. It does not work as well as I hoped. I originally designed this with 1mm holes in a flat surface, unfortunately, my printer could not print the holes that small, and I had to manually drill out the holes. With 1mm holes this did not work at all. I designed in a valve to allow extra air to the vacuum to prevent the motor overheating, but it needs to be fully closed. I under estimated how much air would get through the array of holes. My goal was to have the holes small enough that the vacuum remained rather high, but the small holes did not allow enough air through to keep air seeping in under the print and allowing it to curl up. I created an adapter that allowed me to use my shop vac for more airflow. This did not help I tried counter sinking the holes with a 6mm drill (I wanted a very shallow countersink angle) to allow the vacuum to work on a larger surface area. This also did not work. I tried opening up the holes to 2mm, this sort of worked, but not well enough. I finally covered all the holes not covered by the print with other bits of paper, and the vacuum was just enough to hold a print on thin paper flat. So far I have only printed this once (don't have enough plastic on hand to print another) The STL files have the equivalent of the countersinking, but to 8mm, and 2mm holes though you will probably have to ream out the holes with a drill since plastic printers tend to make the holes undersized. The OpenSCAD design has a 1mm bottom layer, but since I printed it with 0.4mm layers, it came out 1.2mm thick Also although the thickness in the design is 7mm, with 0.4mm layers, it came out 7.2mm thick. The FreeCAD design for the vacuum attachment takes this into account. If you change the layer height, you will have to adjust the FreeCAD design to compensate. You will probably have to adjust the FreeCAD design anyway since you will probably have a different vacuum cleaner than I do. The top surface of the vacuum table should be sanded flat to get a better seal around the holes. Three of the parts of this design are in the FreeCAD file, the main bed was designed in OpenSCAD. The two tools are better at different things. I used the tool that worked best for each part of the design. This design is 250mm square, but the size can be edited in the OpenSCAD file to make a smaller (or larger) version to fit your printer.
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