Leon's Printer

Awesome! Looks like I know what my next parts are that I'll be printing.

 

All parts are printed for the changover to the rails. Need to cut the rods to length and finish the print for the E3D hotend as well... Should be swapped over later this afternoon.

 

I just mounted my Pico hot end with the redesigned carriage. The Pico is significantly shorter than the E3D. Either way, if the Pico doesn't work out, my hot end is now connectorized and it'll be <1hr to swap back to the E3D on the new carriage.

A few things of note with the new carriage:

• I removed the press fit and switched to zip tie mounting. This solved a ton of problems with bearing alignment. It also allows for easy replacement of the carriage without disassembling the whole printer.
• I removed the built in cooling fan mount but added m3 mounting holes to the front side. This will allow me to create custom ducts depending on whether I'm using the E3D or Pico.
• I added a Pico cooling fan mount integrated into the back side of the carriage. I'm particularly proud of this.

I probably won't get to do any testing until Sunday but we'll see what I can do before then.

 

Nice and simple. I dig it.

 

How do you find the direct extruder vs the wade design? Any pros and cons of each. Does it use the same nema sized moter.

 

I'm quite in love with the direct extruder. The con is that the lack of a geared design means that you don't have quite as much torque. This means that very high speeds may not be achievable without increasing the motor size. Increasing the motor size means more mass. More mass means slower speeds.

That said, I print at 60mm/s all day with no problems and I've printed at 80 with no problems. This printer isn't going to get much higher with all the mass it's carrying around so the torque issue is not really that big of a deal.

The upsides are pretty huge. The filament load is a spring clip that you push in and feed the filament through. Everything is lined up so that it just feeds in, no fishing to get the filament started.

Basically, the big improvement is just how simple and easy it is to operate. I've printed hundreds of hours with this cold end design and I wouldn't go back to the geared extruder without a very, very compelling reason!

 

Did you buy a new motor or just use the one from the stock robo?

 

Just the stock robo motor.

 

Leon, did you have to change any feed settings/values when changing to direct extrusion? I've read that a value change has to be made for the hobbed diameter of the hobbed bolt for the geared extruder if the bolt is replaced and the hobbed diameter is different.

 

If you take a look at my thingiverse thing, it lists the new extruder pulses per mm. I think it's 92.6.

 

Bonjour,je suis français ne parle pas anglais.La pico est elle mieux que htend V5?

Cordialement

 

Hats for printers v2.

 

Johnny: "And Leon is getting laaaaarrrrrger."

 

Here was my first print. The top failed due to jamming in the hot end. But, otherwise, this is an octopus at 0.2mm layer height with nothing more than reassembling my Y axis upgrade, setting the Z height and pressing Go.

 

Harry,

Yes it is. However, I switched to Repetier firmware because the Marlin LCD support (specifically VIKI) was lacking.

 

My latest print. 31 hours. 0.2 layer height.

 

That looks awesome!