I ended up upgrading the Z screws to fine Acme screws and run geared nema 17s
the machine sits on a some ceramic plates to keep everything flat and level.
i upgraded he bed to a aluminum plus boro glass & PEI



Quote Originally Posted by longjohn119 View Post
I'm new to this forum and new to Makerfarm products (I have a Pegasus 10 that working beautifully) but I'm not new to 3D printing and certainly not new to CNC type machines. Two things I'd suggest for most of these units I've looked at is first and foremost is upgrade the Z axis to proper screws. Second get proper idler pulleys on the X and Y axises. (More important than most designers seem to realize IMO) Any structures made of wood (OK fake wood really) glue the pieces together if practical (Use good judgement because if you can't keep it squared up you are screwed once it's glued, hence "if practical") and go OCD on making sure everything is squared up and parallel. Attention to details is what separates the men from the boys when working with devices with fractional millimeter resolution. Frankly you are always going to be constantly tweaking any unit with a wood frame, even more true if it's not glued. I got the full kit when I bought a Pegasus 10 last month and the only piece of wood left on it is the spacer between the extruder and the X carriage. 8 bits is plenty to run a Cartesian format device, the math is pretty simple, the Delta format is an entirely different beast requiring much more complex math and then you can take advantage of the 32 bits. Now if you were going to include a touch screen controller and Octoprint all in a single controller package then 32 bits or even 64 bits starts making a lot more sense. A RaspPi 3 would be a good candidate for such a system although I'd modify it for an external WiFi antenna. The real Achilles Heel for the RAMPS is the lack of a proper RS-232 serial clock in the Arduino architecture 16 Mhz doesn't divide down to 115200 very well hence a jitter problem and the need to run at a out of spec baud rate of 250,000 (Which easily divides down from 16 Mhz and why it's more stable) The problem with 250000 is any driver or program that strictly enforces the RS-232 protocol isn't going to like it

Other than generalities without seeing the prints to analyze the actual problems it's hard to be specific. I printed a full sized one of these T-800 heads 0.2 resolution in about 15 hours and it looks as good as any of the examples made on an Ultimaker 2 or a Lulzbot Taz and better than most of the others. I even did a manual color change, it's an eSun PLA+ black base and the skull is eSun PLA white. Granted I've been a Maker about 3 decades before they came up with a term for us so your mileage may vary but you can't beat all metal construction. Expansion/contraction due to temperature is minimal and from humidity pretty much non-existent. Don't feel too bad my first printer was a QUBD Two-up .......