Building Clank(s)

Variants

Two variants of the design are available; both share the same toolchanger and tools. One is more-or-less made for additive, volumetric fab, and the other for sheet-stock processing, or pick-and-place.

Click on one of the variants above to access CAD for either variant.

Required Tools

You don’t need much to start building one of these. Here’s a list of everything that is strictly necessary to build either Clank:

• any FDM 3D printer; the Ender 3 Pro (cheap) and Prusa i3 (better) are great options, costing $300 and $900 respectively
• a set of metric allen keys
• tweezers (for one tricky washer install) and needle nose pliers

There are a few things that make this easier - but aren’t required:

• a deburring tool (to take brims off of printed parts)
• a pliers-style wrench, I use Knipex 86 03 180 - besides being one of my favourite tools of all time, it’s wonderful when inserting nylon hex nuts into printed parts. there’s a lot of that.
• a set of M3, M4 and M5 taps

I typically keep a stock of extrusion in 2 meter lengths, then cut it to size. But Misumi is great in that you can specify for delivery of cut-to-length parts; you can even ask them to tap the ends for you. For example the misumi part number HFS5-4060-735-TPW specifies at 40x60 extrusion profile (5-series) that’s cut at 735mm. Their precision is pretty good, I’ve checked (to 0.1mm is reasonable to expect). The TPW here specifies that ends are fully tapped; this is how I spec them in the BOM to save you some time.

If you want to cut your own extrusions, you’ll also need:

• a miter saw (!) any carpentry saw will do, go slowly. you can get non-ferrous metals blades if you prefer being fancy

That’s about it. Done wisely, my bet is that you could bootstrap yourself a whole tiny shop (4x8’ multipurpose clank, fdm 3d printer, hardware kit, basic tools) for about $1500 all-told, not a bad start.

Printing Parts

There is admittedly a fair amount of printing required to make these machines, maybe ~ 60 hours or so each. Every part has at least one solid planar face that should be oriented towards the printer’s bed; hopefully that’s easy to identify. You’ll notice some Nylock inserts have a chamfered bottom, that chamfer is there to eliminate overhang: its presence is a good indicator of which side should be oriented towards the bed.

I print in PLA, though it (shouldn’t) matter too much. I often use “Tough PLA” which has improved impact strength, but normal PLA will do just as well (and is maybe even stiffer), and ABS should work as well bar the normal warping problems.

If you want a stiff machine, print everything solid. For milling, mass is your friend: if you want to whip around, lighten things up: that’s your call. I normally choose solid since speed is overrated and plastic needs all the stiffness help it can get, but lately I have been just printing enough perimeters (4-5) and ~ 50% infill for speed, ~ 90% infill when I want to maximize stiffness.

Here are the settings I use, some of them are important:

I’ll bet you can have success with almost any print settings, but I thought I would include my setup anyways.

There are some things with GT2 teeth printed in; for those I turn the external perimeter speed way down, like 10mm/s, this improves the fidelity of the profile and makes belts grip better.

W/R/T bed adhesion, do whatever you think is best: I use a “Layerneer” adhesion fluid on a powder-coated Prusa bed, washing it every ~ 2-3 prints. A little prep goes a long way, as they say.

Assembly

My strategy here is to publish very thorough CAD models and then leave order-of-assembly up to the reader. I see that’s a little bit rude, but I think it’s also better than nothing. I hope to link to others’ build logs in the future.

If that has you stuck in the water, for reference check out the clank-lz build log (incl. videos!): the design patterns there, and here, are mostly the same

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Table of contents

• Hotplate Toolchanger
• Core XY Variant
• Lifter Variant
• Composable