Ordering the ISO parts

Summary

It had been a month since I last worked on this project because I haven’t had much time, but now I decided to list and order the required ISO parts and then 3D print the parts I can produce myself.

Calculating

The conveyor must hold and move a maximum of 6–7 lemons, so the top of the conveyor needs at least 12 roller cylinders.

That means the bottom side of the conveyor should also have 12 roller conveyor cylinders.

Where the chain engages the two sprockets (start and end) I plan to add 7 more conveyor cylinders, resulting in a total of 29 conveyor cylinders.

ISO parts

The required ISO parts:

This is a problem

Ordering every item above is expensive and currently unaffordable, and I still need two motors and miscellaneous hardware to finish the build.

Printing out for myself some parts

I cannot print the sprockets, bearings, or screws reliably. I could try printing the chain, but I worry that surface roughness and dimensional inaccuracy from FDM printing will cause poor conveyor flow.

I can 3D print the spur gears and the rack-and-pinion, but I will likely need to tune print settings (layer height, extrusion multiplier, and post-processing like sanding or annealing) to get usable parts.

Now, without the expensive to-print parts, my reduced parts list and cost:

First I’ll experiment by 3D printing one or two chain segments; if they work reliably I can save the chain cost (19 520 HUF) and place the rest of the order.