Ball joint cable chain rear mount

I run a single cable drag chain on my RatRig V-core 3.

The cable chain has some tolerances at each joint, which causes the chain to sag over long distances. To counteract this, I designed this ball joint mount to allow the cable chain starting point at the back to be rotated upward and tilted backward.

With the ball joint, you have the freedom to tilt the first link in any direction and z-height of the ball can be varied with sliding T-nuts in the back mount.

With this mount, I can almost entirely take the weight off the toolhead and get perfectly matched resonance graphs for the belts.

The mounting plate has holes for an IGUS cable chain series 04. They are 22 mm apart and 8 mm apart. If you need a different distance, let me know.

Required for mounting:

• 4x M6 T-nuts and 12mm bolts
• M3x6 and 2 threaded inserts M3 for mounting the cable chain mount to the plate

Print the plate with the male thread in a somewhat flexible material. I used eSUN ePA-CF for that part and ePAHT-CF for the other parts.

Update 21 feb 2022: adjusted male threaded part to have more grip on the ball and make it easier to insert the ball. Fixed number of ribs on the nut, which didn't transfer correctly to a newer version of Freecad.