MPCNC Drag Knife Holder: Lock Screw

While calibrating the MPCNC’s probe camera offset for the drag knife holder, this happened:

Well, at least it’s centered on the target:

This happened a few times before, because my fingers don’t fit neatly inside the drag knife holder to tighten the lock ring:

[Update: The lock ring keeps the holder at a fixed position inside the 12 mm shaft and doesn’t affect the blade directly. When the ring works loose, the threaded holder can rotate to expose more blade and, in this case, stab deeper into the target. ]

So I turned & knurled an aluminum ring, then tapped a 3×0.5 mm hole for a lock screw plucked from the Drawer o’ Random M3 Screws:

A view looking along the screw shows a bit more detail around the spring:

The general idea is to set the blade extension, then tighten the lock screw to hold it in place, without relying on the original brass lock ring, shown here while cutting a boss for the spring:

The lock screw’s knurled handle just barely kisses the NPCNC’s black tool holder ring, so my guesstimated measurements were a bit off. Clamping the knife holder one itsy higher in the tool holder solved the problem.

I cranked on 300 g of spring preload and, squashed like that, the spring’s rate is now 75 g/mm. Cutting at Z=-1 mm should suffice for laminated paper slide rule decks.

The original sizing doodle:

The short 18 mm section clears the inside of the LM12UU bearing, although it could be a millimeter shorter. The 19 mm section comes from the 3/4 inch aluminum rod I used, skim-cut to clean it up.

If I ever remake this thing, it needs a major re-think to get all the dimensions flying in formation again.