Making the reduced weight servo mk2

Earlier I described my design plan for reducing the overall mass of the moteus servo mk2.  Constructing a prototype of this turned out to take many more iterations and time than I had expected!  Along the way I produced and scrapped two front housings, two outer housings and a back housing.

I made one complete prototype which only had the weight reduction applied to some of the parts and lacked a back cover and any provision for a wire cover.  It was the one from the moteus controller r4.1 juggling video:

Because of the multiple tries on the large-for-me front and back housing, I had to make soft-jaws and prepare stock in a more efficient manner.

I also had to get new workholding solutions for the PocketNC in the form of the wcubed vise.

Design updates

Every one of the pieces got reworked in some manner or designed from scratch for the things that did not exist previously.

Front housing: Here I iterated on how much material to remove from the central cavity.  Initially I removed more, but it gave the primary output bearing problems to be loaded intermittently.  Also, I had adhesion problems with the ring gear when too little material was left there.  I settled on a continuous ring for the output bearing and a decent amount of material for the internal gear.

Back housing: I tweaked the back housing mounting points so that the outer housing could be symmetric.  Also, I added a facility for the wire cover to guard the phase wires entering the controller.

Outer housing: The outer housing was largely unchanged from my initial weight reduced design, although I produced one bad one due to a simple mistake locating the mounting hole, and a second because the stud lengths between the front and back were different in an earlier iteration.

Planet output: The planet output design changed only to add some weight reducing cutouts.  This was the last part for which I was still using mk1 servo spare parts for, so now I actually manufactured a prototype in house.

Planet input: Here there are now weight reducing cutouts, and the mating studs use less material.

Back cover: The back cover design is basically unchanged, I just had to make one for the first time.

Wire cover: The wire cover is a part of the design I had deferred until now.  It bolts to the back housing and shrouds the phase wires.

Assembly

Here’s some assembly pictures: