MakerFarm 8" i3v Prusa build by Printbus

[printbus]

The X-carriage design has been published. See the "MakerFarm i3v/Pegasus X-Carriage for Bondtech BMG and e3dv6" item on Thingiverse at https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3453439.

[CoffeeCup]

The X-carriage design has been published. See the "MakerFarm i3v/Pegasus X-Carriage for Bondtech BMG and e3dv6" item on Thingiverse at https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3453439.

Hell Printbus,

It's great to see you still have your 8" MF i3v running. This is the same model I have which I just dusted off last week and got her running again after almost four years. She still functions well. After becoming re-acquainted with it I immediately became a bit tired of Greg's accessible extruder. While the printer serves my purpose for now making small ABS parts, I started searching to see if anybody upgraded their MF with a newer extruder. Can you comment on your experience with your Bondtech BMG?

[printbus]

...Can you comment on your experience with your Bondtech BMG?

Similar to RobH2, I only rarely use the printer these days - my time seems to continually get tied up in other things. With one exception, I've been pretty happy with the BMG. The big advantages are it's small, compact, and light. I do seem to have to level the print surface every time I print something, but only using the printer every few months could have more to do with that than the BMG and/or the associated carriage plate & hot end mount.

The one thing I miss from the Greg's Wade extruder is that the BMG has no easy way to release a filament. With the Greg's Wade, I'd heat up the hot end, reverse the extruder a few mm, and then release the grip on the filament so I could pull the soft filament out without the hobbed bolt pressing against the filament. With the BMG, you essentially have no choice but to keep reversing the extruder until the filament can be pulled from the gearing. There's a access lever you can unscrew that removes one of the gears, but the filament continues to press against the rear gear. I only rarely change filaments, so it isn't that big of a deal but it is something I don't care for.

If you opt to stick with the Greg's Wade, I'd definitely check out my remix of it. My research concluded the parts MF was shipping with the printer really weren't very optimal. The last Greg's Wade I printed was on my printer a couple of years before I swapped it out for the BMG approach.

On the rails vs. rods, yeah I don't know which provides a more rigid approach. I opted for the MF rail approach since what I read made me want to avoid linear bearings, and one of my goals was also to minimize the use of zip ties as mechanical fasteners on my printer. Seems that most printers using rods use zip ties to hold the linear bearings in place, and I didn't care for that.