Excellent point.
I did indeed forget that.
Allow to look over your pix again as I didn’t take that into account. I saw stock z and though u were being “fancy” which is ok by me, but not conducive 
The simplest solution is one I used before suckit was released.
I used longer screws for the vwheels and attached the verticals to that.
No modding the carriage involved.
{After this line lies the no judgement zone where no matter how you think I’m saying what I say there is no judgement in my mind as I was once standing where you are now standing}
So…
Once you get over the whole vanilla thing and realize that if u completely break your carriage it will only cost about $40 to replace. Once I made that realization I immediately drilled and tapped two holes in the extrusions exactly where I needed them for my nut blocks and never looked back.
Of course I was careful but no longer terrified. Same for my spindle mount. Drilled 8 holes broke a bit off in one and moved on with my life after a quick shrug.
Soooooo my point is I understand the mindset of not wanting to mod something but getting past it will open up windows and doors you never knew existed.
Good luck on your journey and I hope to see you all on the same road to happiness I found.
the first thing i carved on my machine was a X-mounted dust boot. i got the pieces epoxied together, marked their location and drilled 4 M5 holes in my carriage 
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Have you ever looked back?
That’s a fair point. Don’t get me wrong, I really don’t have any problem drilling holes in my carriage either, but I wouldn’t want to do that until I had the new Z axis in hand so I could be 100% sure of the final fit. So, I may end up doing that in the end - if nothing else, this will get me by in the meantime.
Excellent! Let’s see how it turns out. I do love complex stuff but simple gets it done.
Any idea how this upgrade will perform compared to the stock setup with respect to z axis speed? I realize this isn’t an issue for most, but I have a very heavy drilling oriented use case for my x-carve right now and have cranked the z-axis speed up to ~1800 mm/min and would definitely prefer not to have to lower the speed to gain the increase in rigidity.
Although not quite the same thing, mine is pretty close to this and I am running my Z-Axis at 120 IPM / about 3000 mm/min.
EDIT: I also upgraded my motor to 269 oz/in.
It uses the original drive mechanism (pulleys, leadscrew, etc) so offhand I don’t see why the max achievable Z speed would be much different unless the friction in the axis was a lot different.
It’s interesting this was raised, because I was just messing with (stock) Z axis speed yesterday and was only able to raise it to about 1000mm/min before it started skipping steps. I’m using grbl with DRV8825’s on a shield and have the current cranked up to about 2.5A, with motors from OpenBuilds that are rated about the same as the X-carve stock steppers. I haven’t really tried to debug it because it seemed reasonable given that the X-carve stock Z speed is only 500mm/min, but now that you guys are saying you’re going substantially faster I’m starting to wonder…
What’s your $112= setting?
I found that the $122 acceleration setting has a bigger influence in skipping steps than the $112 speed. With the additional weight of the Z axis so you need more stopping power. $1 step idle delay defines the stopping power.
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Ok, but if $112=500 you can’t achieve 1000
I was using $112 to set the max rate and then doing rapids (G0) so I know I wasn’t being limited by that; and anyway, when I had trouble at higher rates it was clearly skipping steps (lots of them), not just moving slower than expected. I tried various values of 1000 or more, but much beyond 1000 it got dicey, so I backed it off to 800 for now.
I haven’t played with the acceleration setting yet, maybe that will help a bit - though of course that effectively reduces Z rate for short moves, so hopefully I don’t have to take it too far.
What is your $122?
That is a lot more than the standard 500 and 50 advised on a standard machine. Impressive gain with the larger motors.
Twice the drive ratio, motor with about twice the torque, and a max rate that’s in the ballpark of double what my experiment seemed to show the stock configuration was able to manage. The math checks out!
Speaking of math… Phil, based on that value of 95 steps/mm, I take it you are half-stepping?
I have a T8 ACME rod on Z with a similar config as you Phil, Nema23 (269oz.in @ 2.8A but mine is limited at 2.6A)
$112 = 1500
$122 = 100
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@JacobSmelley I have my machine running Z at I think 1600mm/min. I would need to check the configuration. The main limit with my current set-up though is the motor driver – I am running LinuxCNC with a TB6560 board and have discovered why people say they’re junk (exploding chips, poor high-speed performance with larger motors, etc.) I haven’t upgraded to a better driver since that speed is adequate for my uses of the X-carve.
I do have both an Arduino CNC shield and a TinyG, neither of which can fully drive the bigger motors but which may still perform better than the 6560s. I could test with one of those if anyone has a preference. The motor would stall even completely disconnected from the machine so it’s definitely an electrical issue and it seems to happen mostly regardless of motor size (NEMA 17 gets slightly better top speed but is vastly inferior in torque)
The linear rods and bushings do have some “stiction” when the Z is still but once it gets moving the motion is very smooth.
Same.
I can only set continuous current limit with my TB6560´s and chose 2.6A (next option is 3.0A)
They only get a smidge warmer than ambient so could possibly set it at 3A, but I tried once to stall the X during a test carve by holding onto the Z-carriage. It didn’t skip a beat (I am 6´2 and 245lbs)
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I have been asked so I’ll spill the beans – the secret special bonus item for pre-orders is a pre-production unit of my X-Carve anti-backlash nut! The only difference between the pre-production and final versions is that the pre-production is made from white acetal copolymer while the final version will be made from black Delrin acetal homopolymer. Realistically the material composition should have little or no effect on the performance or durability. When I get around to making some of them I’ll post some pictures. For now I’ve been busy making parts for the Zplunge assembly itself 
For those who missed it here is a link to my pre-order page!
http://store.knucleon.com/zplunge-linear-slide-assembly/