So now the laser is continuing on nicely. There are some things that I really would have liked to change, but at the same time I am working on a budget, so I tried to repurpose as many parts that I had lying around as possible. Some of the things i would have changed is for the linear rail, I would have went with something a bit lighter such as MGN9 vs the MGN15 that I used. But, I had them on hand and didnt want to shell out for new rail. I was already in it for a bit with the aluminum dibond.
Also I would have really liked to have gone with 10mm gt2 belts as opposed to the 6mm ones that I used. But I can change that at a later date just by switching out the pulleys, idlers, and spacers. It will require an almost complete teardown and rebuild, but in the mean time I will see how these 6mm belts hold. It has been my experience that they wear and stretch much faster than their 10mm counterparts.
One thing tho, making the spacers was a bit of a pain. In the early days, Openbuilds tended to be very inconsistant with their offerings. It would seem that everytime that I would order, I never got the same thing twice. For a while, their spacers would either be excessively thick or super thin walled. The problem witht the thin wall ones is that they would wander and not sit directly on the hub of the bearings and drag on the bearing cover. Also, if they were meant to take stress, they would tend to crumple at the ends. The super thick ones on the other hand, fit nicely on the bolt, but sometimes would get in the way. So my solution was to take a few of the 6.35mm spacers and turn them down to 5mm with a small lip on the contact side of the idler which acted like a built in washer to keep it from rubbing on the outer race of the idler.
For the actual spacers, I just used stock 20mm aluminum spacers to take the structural load and act as crush washers so that there was about 0.25mm of play between the idlers and the top and bottom spacers which allows the belt to find its own alignment.