In the last days, I thought a lot about how I could design the wire guide. I've seen the videos from BAXEDM, ActionBox and others on youtube and it seems like their designs are doing a great job at guiding the wire and so I will try to build something similar, but more compact and as simple as possible.

My idea for the design, that I'm planning to build in the next few days, is to simplify the wire guide a bit by keeping it similar to a tape recorder or an old tape drive computer.

My current plan is to keep the wire guide stationary while moving the workpiece.

I thought about removing the Y axis from the 3D printer and using the Z axis as new Y axis. This way the X axis and former Z axis would form an upreight X and Y axis.

After that I would add another motor to the new Y axis and clamps for workpieces to the X axis which can then be moved left/right and up/down. I will likely not cut workpieces weighing more than 5kg on this machine, so I think that the weight should not be a problem.

Instead of the old Y axis, I would place a water container with tiny holes for the wire in its sidewalls, at its position. The container would be filled with water and a bit of the water would leak out at the inlet for the wire and so I would place another container under it to collect the water, so that it can flow back to the water system.

The roll with the new wire and the roll for the old wire would be mounted on top of the printer. (Maybe I would add some additional bracing to get more surface for mounting the rolls on top of it.) The wire would then be guided from the new wire spool down to a bearing, to a bearing with a load cell, to another bearing, through the water container, to a bearing, to an encoder wheel, to another bearing and back to the used wire spool.

At the moment this is just an idea and I hope that I can make the build a bit simpler by keeping the wire guide stationary and moving the workpiece instead of it.

It could also turn out, that its more complicated or not possible to do it this way, so that I have do build it the other way around, but at the end I'm doing these projects just for fun and so it will not be a big deal to cancel an idea and try out a new one.