Why does my printer suck.

[uncle_bob]

.......

However, the setup on the Pegasus is a lot less, you don't have to build motor mounts and multiple layers of plywood to create a frame.

Hi

At least in my experience, the "plywood" based machines had a hard time holding adjustments over time spans in months or years. That seems (so far) to be less of an issue with the Pegasus versions.

No matter which printer you dig into, you will find people that have slicing issues. We all are using basically the same set of programs and seeing the same issues with them. Since most of us like *free* software (I certainly do), that's all a little bit silly. This is indeed a world where free does not encourage people to keep working on the code base. Bugs hang around for a long time. Getting an un-paid team organized and working together over a period of years is a very tough proposition. Much of the free software (Apache, Linux etc) that is successful is actually paid software that is given away. We don't have the kind of money in the 3d printer space to fund at those sort of levels.

Bob

[clough42]

Hi

At least in my experience, the "plywood" based machines had a hard time holding adjustments over time spans in months or years. That seems (so far) to be less of an issue with the Pegasus versions.

That very well could be. The one really critical adjustment is the Z height, and if that drifts, printing will suffer considerably. Using auto bed leveling mostly solves that problem.

I say "mostly" because if your bed is warping with temperature changes, the Z height can change after the leveling process finishes, and can even create banding in the parts as the bed cycles.

This was a big problem with the i3 because the third bearing was near the center of the wooden bed. I put a dial indicator on mine and it moved down to about -0.5mm during the initial heatup, and then moved up to about +0.2mm as the heat soaked through the wooden part. Colin told me this only happens if you paint the wood. All of my printers are lacquered, so I can't confirm or deny.

The i3v has the wheels out closer to the corners, so it's not as bad.