bed levelling and stuff

[stevekr2]

Greetings All.
First may I thank all of you for your informative and lively discussions on here, very educational.
Geoff if you are still here, thank you for some great input to help new guys, have seen your desire to go to the "dark side" but hope you resist the urge.
Now to business.. FLASH FORGE PRO....... my uneducated observations.
I followed the advice to go with glass, and dang, it worked.... HOWEVER... I felt the screws that hold the build plate were a touch proud, slide a glass plate over the Aluminum and it catches..
so I removed Build plate and counter sunk the bolt holes just a touch more. Glass is pancake flat now, not proud in the middle as many have observed, even with the steel build frame brackets under the table, some thing to consider.
even sliding a razor blade up to the bolt head will quickly tell you all is not well. if a steel rule (150mm) can stand on its edge (length) then you are good to go.

I removed left stepper extruder motor, lifted the hot end up 2 mmm, and rebolted the fan using the same bolts but with nuts on the end.
Then trimmed a 16 mm Ali tube to length (42.3) on a lathe to add as a compression strut instead of the motor, rather than print off the one on thingyverse.
This reduced weight but also removed the hassle of fixing wires back ect (full respect to those that follow it back though)I have no concern of extruder now clashing with a print with the bonus it is a simple mater to replace if going down a duel print road, which honestly, I am not ready for yet anyway.

other thing I did, which is personal was, I purchased "Simplfied3d" I can only compare the slicer that came with the bot, and Slic3r with S3d but to me it wins hands down, the finish on the prints are very different, The 45* infill outer layers really works.

Thanks for looking.... hope it helps some one else....

[Geoff]

I won't stray too far, I might be a little furious with Flashforge as a company, but I still think I made a good decision to buy mine back when, and still don't regret it - my FF has done more hours than machines I know that cost 4 times as much and needed less work - I couldn't afford a $4k makerbot then, and I can't now lol... and for a $1k machine to do what it has, I cannot complain. By selling printed things on ebay, it made me back what it cost to buy (not to repair... still have some more to go there..) but still, it was a good workhorse and even after fixing it in the past few days, it's back and running OK again. It might not have many of it's original parts in it, but the design and print quality from a well setup flashforge is in my opinion better than a makerbot gen5.

Building your own printer is time consuming, a constant tweaking process (alot of fun sure) but for those wanting to just get into 3D printing, buying a pre-built one is still the best way to go I think, and now there is even more choice than before, it's hard to pick.

If you could post some pictures your upgrades that would be cool!

As for software, have you tried Makerware? for me personally and the Flashforge, it's a good mix. Slices much much faster than the others and seems to be perfectly compatible, for single and dual colour prints. It's a little limited, but it get's the job done.

[curious aardvark]

you do seem to have gone the long way round to avoid head drag. I've just removed the brass nozzle from the right head.
I will defintiely do dual printing in the future - but for the 2 minutes it takes to just remove or replace the brass nozzle - it's worth it for one nozzle printing.

I actually wasn't getting head drag anyway, but I can calibrate finer and quicker with just the one head.

Screw wise - they all look well countersunk to me.
haven't checked. But I'm printing on blue tape on glass at the moment anyway.

Looked at simplyfy3d - but no way am i buying software without a trial.

I've got high hopes for slicer and gcode modifications at the moment, so I'll go that route first and I'm hoping the simpify3d bods will be at the TCT show in september at the NEC, so i can at least have a good look at it working.