getting crazy

After tuneing the redsnapper setting the prints went better.

I use 245 deg celsius extruding temp. 0.65 mm extrude material width. 0.41 layer thickness and 0.8 mm infill distance.

I am still printing the meshball. www.thingiverse.com
The total time at 275 mm / min is 7 hours! INCREDIBLE SLOW! I need to print a mendel or huxley.  So hopefully tomorrow I will upload the pictures of the complete model.

Here is a video of me waiting for the print to finish. Feel my impatience?

Anyhow: IT IS WORKING! Now comes the real challange: designing usefull parts...

The maximum build volume is around 200x150x65 mm. More than enough with the current speed.

IT PRINTS!!!

The first parts came out. So fare so good. But still a long way to go. The E_STEPS_PER_MM is still not set very well and I have a lot of issues with wraping. The ATX power supply stopped working after 5 minutes and I needed to print all parts cold on painter's tape and glue.

Still I am very happy. No smoke just unlimited possiblities.

final steps

cooling the ehated bed from below to prevent any melting of plastic parts.

Here we are after 2 weeks of work. Ready for the first test print...

rewireing the extruder - classical way

 Due to a shortcut cased by the nut on the heater barrel, which squeezed the wired too much and damaged them, I had to replace the heater wire. This time I chosse the classical method, but with a longer wire due to the 24 V. I think 20 Watt should be enough for the speed I plan to print with.

lifting up the X-axis

 Due to the big extruder parts I needed to move up the complete x/z-stage around 70 mm. This way I can use the limited Z movement to it's maximum.

Also I mounted the power supply for the heated bed.

heated bed

y-axis support for the heated bed:

made of 5 mm aluminum:

I used structured silicon layers with kapton inbetween to make some good insulation.

I removed some of the insulation to screw the resistors. I have 4x 4.7Ohm in parralel at 12 V and 2x 1 Ohm in parallel at 5V. So I have around 10 amps on each Voltage and more then 150 Watts heating power.

Glueing the temperature sensor in the middle. Adding more insulation layers.

 Top View:

Here you can also see the temperature controller. It automatically finds the best parameters for PID which saves a lot of time. Less work, more coffee.

modifying the z-stage to hold the extruder

introducing aluminum parts

I wanted to change several extruder parts from ABS to aluminum for longer lifetime.

Starting Point

Some gerneral impressions of my starting point:

 Notice the milling motor is still on top:

z-stage:

x-stage:

 y-stage:

 Stepper testing with generation 6 electronics. With 12 Volt the steppers start to loose steps at around 230 mm/min. This far too slow. I expected much more with the 2 mm inclinded spindle. With 24 Volt I can savely read around 300 mm/min. Still dead slow. I will use is as a starting point and will also layout my extruder for 24 Volt and later use better stepper motors.