I recently had an idea about moving the X axis motor off the X carriage. I suspect there is little benefit of doing this, but I felt I had to at least knock out a quick prototype to see it in action.

The video below actually details it all quite well, but i’ll also add a few pictures and a description below.

So, the idea is to move the X motor off the carriage. One immediate benefit is that the size of the entire X axis is no longer constrained by the size of the motor, perhaps leading to more compact designs?  It would be interesting to try out a vertical X axis design with this setup.

Anyway, the X motion is transferred to the belt via a square extrusion rod which drives a cog which sits directly on it.  This rod slides through the mount and cog during Z motion.  The belt in this design is within the two X smooth rods, but other layouts could be adapted to move the belt to the outside (as with  the original Huxley I believe).  In this design the hot-end would either have to fit through the belts, or hang over the edge of the rods.  Again, here the vertical layout would be interesting.