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My X winder is by far the best machine in my workshop. It works straight out of the box, makes high precision parts and also looks pretty neat. Being a tinkererer with a 3d printer though, means I was always going to make some modifications. Today I have seen the future of the x winder, which may make some of my modifications somewhat obsolete, but there will be more!

Resin Squeezer:

I found that despite all of the rollers and the elastic squeezers, I was still getting too much resin on my parts. To overcome this, I designed some parts that were to clamp together using bolts to allow a varying level of pressure. The early versions (pictured), used silicone bands and bolts to apply variable pressure. These turned out to be a lot of work and the bolts would often be permanently epoxied. To rectify this, I have now removed the bolts and apply pressure via an elastic band knotted lengthwise, which has the added advantage of keeping the filament in a narrow plane. I have also permanently bonded seam sealing silicone onto the plastic to provide a smooth and flexible surface, which saves a bunch of time. I will show some pics of this updated configuration shortly.

Resin feeder:

This one was designed to drip resin into the bath slowly to avoid the build-up which imparts too much resin into the fibers and then onto the parts (wastes resin and leads to extra clean up). I mixed up the dimensions on this one, but the concept should work on the next version

Tape dispenser:

I feel like this is the most important mod, but will be the most difficult to execute. Wrapping the cash register tape, cello tape and heat shrink tape is all currently done by hand and requires both consistent tape pressure and tape angle. Using a tool, could obviously make this more consistent. One of my current versions can be seen below. The idea is that it locks into the aluminium profile near the feeder head and can take varying tape sizes, provide varying pressure and angles. In the version that goes to print, I will probably provide the pressure from the bottom rather than the top to reduce size and part count, but this should hopefully give an indication!  

A video below:

tape%20holder%20render.wmv