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Ben's Printer

Discussion in 'Show and Tell' started by Ben Lindstrom, Sep 26, 2013.

  1. Ben Lindstrom

    Ben Lindstrom Active Member

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    So after around ~24 hours (over 4 days) it looks like I have my printer dialed in (owned it for a week and half), and both ABS and PLA prints nearly flawless.

    Many thanks to Leon, Tesseract, and others for feedback and direction.

    From a "technical newb" standpoint there a few things that bother me about this printer (none of them are end-of-world):

    1. Z-axis home seems "broken". Not from the fact it doesn't work, but from the fact that the RAMP board (I assume it is at that level) seems to treat the microswitches as "change of state" devices. So if you home the Z-axis, then home it again the chances are high (worse if you've mucked with the Z-axis screw) that you'll have the nuts spin out of the X carriage as the print head sits on the bed. The behavior I'd expect would be to back off from the switch until it goes from "ON" to "OFF" then back off a bit more just to be safe then go down until the switch is triggered. It is a nitpicky thing, but this feature alone would have saved me an hour or two of releveling the X carriage after I mistakenly didn't hit +10 Z before re-homing it while setting the print head distance.

    2. Lack of bed leveling. Right now the down and dirty fix was to shove an aluminum L bracket under the drawer rails on the backside in order to bring the back up just enough to level the bed. The fact that there isn't any support on the front or back of those rails looks to be problematic. I have tesseract's bed leveling mod printed off, and I just need to acquire the rest of the parts. But this is a pretty decent flaw that I'm sure is at the root of some folks' issues.

    3. Cheezy bedclips. Broke one already as I was trying to get them from flopping out from the side. Also ended up laying blue tape down on the outer edges to keep the boroglass from slipping around while printing as there is a lot of play with no ability to lock it down. This is on my list of things to find/design a replacement for, but for the time being I'm using two trusty 1" binder clips.

    Other than that I've been happy with it. It was faster to get working from a "technical newb" standpoint then I expected. My goal was to have something more interesting than a 15mm calibration cube printed for this weekend to show friends at gaming. I didn't expect to be able to print my Derp Fox so quickly. I was able to print him on Wednesday night.

    In terms of print settings changes from Robo's defaults. I only tuned the printer down to 85% speed. I'm more concern over things looking right at this point than absolute speed (see bed clip comment). I'm personally not in a hurry, and I wanted solid layers and prints to know I had it right. I'm using aquanet on boroglass (didn't seem to need it for ABS), and the print below is using the Monoprice white ABS (color is off on the phone and I didn't care to drag out my real camera at 2am nor go through my normal photography work flow).

    So without any more chatter "Derp Fox v1 - Arctic Edition" is my first official non-test print.

    DerpFox-Printv1.jpg
     
    3 people like this.
  2. Deadwood

    Deadwood Active Member

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    Hi
    good to hear its going well, what layer hight have you used on the fox ?
     
  3. Ben Lindstrom

    Ben Lindstrom Active Member

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    Left it at 0.3mm for layer height and 0.35mm for first layer. Wasn't planning on moving down to 0.1mm until I get everything put back together and I have better models that can take advantage of that resolution.
     
  4. tesseract

    tesseract Moderator
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    Very nice congrats on the print it looks good
     
  5. Ben Lindstrom

    Ben Lindstrom Active Member

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    Two fans later (one burnt up after a few minutes, one I broke the housing and had to fix up), a new thermistor because I wasn't careful enough and broke the legs off the first, and the new e3d v6 print head it all belonged to... My printer is back up and running (I've been off dealing with conventions for the latter half of last year so this has been a long haul of finding time... *sigh*).

    My last major issue is the @#$% bed. Hopefully I have it level enough for the large print needed to print the parts for a new bed platform. Even with the temporary spring stand offs leveling this beast has been painful.

    But it is tuned in to .12mm layers again, and the new ABS 15mm calibration cube looks the best of any that has come off this printer so far... Except one corner which I suspect is due to the fact the print head itself isn't 100% vertical. Which means I may have have to pull the print head out and try again. Would be nice to have a better Y carriage for this (had to drill it out slightly to even make it work).
    2014-11-09 01.35.21.jpg
     

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