Stream of I3V 12" Build Consciousness

[lakester]

Was looking for something with a little height. I really picked the wrong thing, but it ended up being an interesting experiment anyway.

At the very least, I need to secure the printer to a rigid and stable surface. Still, if this is the worst it does in less than ideal circumstances..., it's not too bad.

https://youtu.be/BAD4ikaqFhE

Will be interesting to see what mods things like this might lead to...

[voodoo28]

Looks good! ....the bits of roughness you see on the edges could be that your retractions settings need some tweaking..

Was looking for something with a little height. I really picked the wrong thing, but it ended up being an interesting experiment anyway.

At the very least, I need to secure the printer to a rigid and stable surface. Still, if this is the worst it does in less than ideal circumstances..., it's not too bad.

https://youtu.be/BAD4ikaqFhE

Will be interesting to see what mods things like this might lead to...

[lakester]

Thx! That reminds me: what I should do is look for calibration shapes appropriate to this printer....

Looks good! ....the bits of roughness you see on the edges could be that your retractions settings need some tweaking..

[lakester]

So I needed a knob for the LCD panel. Who doesn't?

While I was assembling the extruder, I knew what it had to be, and that it might be a good opportunity to begin learning FreeCAD.

On the first go around, I simply doubled the size of the extruder motor pinion, closed up some holes, and put in a 6mm hole.

The print produced something like a 5.715mm hole, and it didn't fit.

Of course, 6mm wouldn't have fit either..., since I didn't measure the shaft particularly carefully. Went back and mic-ed it for real and found it was more like 6.1mm diameter. Adding a 5% allowance seemed like too much, so I kinda split the difference and tried a 3% shrinkage allowance (and added a bevel to the hole to match the shaft). That one fits and is the one in the picture.

Turns out, doubling the size of the part was a bit much. The rotary encoder is not mounted on the PCB in a particularly robust way, and I think this knob gives too much leverage, increasing the possibility of breakage. So..., I'll probably shrink it down to something 1.5x w/ a 6.3mm x 10mm hole.

Was a little disappointed w/ FreeCAD on Linux (Mint 17). The version in the package repo is 0.14, and is flaky as hell. Unusable for my purposes actually. So I'm using the most recent Mac version (0.15) and that seems to be OK, though I'd much rather be using the desktop for this stuff.

Anyways..., here's a vid and a pic...

https://youtu.be/X0VV6cXjzKU

20150513_085756.jpg

[voodoo28]

You can try setting the length from 1mm to 1.75...that will help with the tiny blobs. I had mine set to. 1mm and was having the blobs too.

Slic3r allows specification of the following related to retraction:

• Length (set to 1mm)
• Lift Z (0mm)
• Speed (defaults to 30mm-s)
• Extra length on restart. (set to 0mm)
• Minimum travel after retraction (2mm)
• Retract on layer change (true)
• Wipe while retracting. (false)
• A couple of multi-extruder relted items.

I only wanted to play w/ retract speed initially, since my sense was that if I started fiddling w/ length, I'd have to balance that against the "extra length on restart" value.

Lift Z would probably be a last ditch sorta thing, since you'd take a pretty big performance hit playing w/ Z on a Y-bed printer like a Prusa. Printers w/ a Z-bed MIGHT do better w/ this, and deltas I assume would.

FWIW.., Clough42's part cooling fan shroud (stretched version w/ ears added) is printing now..., hopefully will get to install it in the next 2-3 days. Heh..., this is my first ABS part. Now I know what curling is all about, hence the ears!

[Hankus]

Speaking of printing printer parts, I recently printed a set of spare parts for my i3v 10" with hexagon hot end. When I printed the extruder piece, I noticed that a couple of locations on the bed lifted after maybe 10mm or more of ABS 3mm had been layed down. I reprinted the same extruder with another brand of ABS to see if that made any difference, but the same lifting occurred. But what really gets me is when I look at the piece supplied by Makerfarm and currently being used, it has the same evidence of lifting with the exact same resulting curved surfaces as those printed by me. This would indicate a common problem and seeing how STUCK the ABS remains to a heated bed, makes me believe that cooling of the ABS is causing the lifting or the mass of ABS itself draws more heat than the bed can maintain.

[lakester]

Yup. I saw the exact same thing.

As part of my "well..., while I have ABS loaded, might as well as use it" theme, I printed off the extruder pieces.

I didn't really notice it until long after removing it from the bed, but the main extruder structure had warped significantly on the table facing side, on the arm that mounts the upper right corner of the motor.

And yup, the MF supplied part has the exact same problem.

Heh..., the reason it all seems to work, in my case anyway, is that magically, the side on which the motor mounts is straight and true. Now THAT, I don't get.

FWIW, I was experimenting with different bed temps. I THINK that for the extruder parts I started at 110C, and after a few layers, backed it down to 84C..., or possibly 90C. The prints (of other things) that I left at 110C tended to exhibit spreading on the bottom layers over time.

I also found it useful to print difficult (ABS) parts by themselves rather than in groups, in order to "keep the heat on" each layer as long as possible, without long wait times as the machine went to render the perimeters of other parts.

One thought that has crossed my mind is the possibility that an enclosure might be useful.

Speaking of printing printer parts, I recently printed a set of spare parts for my i3v 10" with hexagon hot end. When I printed the extruder piece, I noticed that a couple of locations on the bed lifted after maybe 10mm or more of ABS 3mm had been layed down. I reprinted the same extruder with another brand of ABS to see if that made any difference, but the same lifting occurred. But what really gets me is when I look at the piece supplied by Makerfarm and currently being used, it has the same evidence of lifting with the exact same resulting curved surfaces as those printed by me. This would indicate a common problem and seeing how STUCK the ABS remains to a heated bed, makes me believe that cooling of the ABS is causing the lifting or the mass of ABS itself draws more heat than the bed can maintain.

[Hankus]

Yes I thought the same thing about the extruder with regards to how fortunate that motor side was straight. And yes I also tried printing multiple pieces and had poor results and came away with the same thought.

The enclosure idea is one I'm working on now. Have all the materials purchased and now just trying to find the time to work it into my schedule now that the weather around here has improved to the point that outside projects now have priority. I plan to follow the design of this Youtube contributor who also has a Makerfarm i3v 10".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkicD2RMveE His final design was shown in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIWCAOSgp8Q

My cabinet will share the same basic shape, but I also plan to build mine with a base so I can move the installed printer about without much problem. Maybe a couple of hand grips on the sides for ease of holding.

[lakester]

That voice sounds familiar..., I think he has another vid as well somewhere. Heh..., OK..., now I need a CNC router...

The base with handles sounds like a good idea.

...

The enclosure idea is one I'm working on now. Have all the materials purchased and now just trying to find the time to work it into my schedule now that the weather around here has improved to the point that outside projects now have priority. I plan to follow the design of this Youtube contributor who also has a Makerfarm i3v 10".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkicD2RMveE His final design was shown in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIWCAOSgp8Q

My cabinet will share the same basic shape, but I also plan to build mine with a base so I can move the installed printer about without much problem. Maybe a couple of hand grips on the sides for ease of holding.

[lakester]

So after a frustrating bit of bed leveling following the install of the parts cooler, and the discovery of "issues" w/ my build table, I decided to upgrade the z end-stop to something a little more useable.

At first I tried to modify clough42's original design to work with the 12" I3V, but FreeCAD was giving me too much difficulty. Between outright crashes and hangs, and really out of date docs, I just decided to make do with clough42's original design, hacked with parts I could get at my local, rural, Ace Hardware.

Though the results aren't optimum, they work waaaaaay better than even the updated MF design.

This will be my last fiddling with z end-stop adjustment prior to adding some form of ABL.

20150520_133606-small.jpg