DDY's 3D Printer Adventure

[mangekyoumusa]

That looks like a jungle,
How long do you think it'll take for you until you finished the printer?

I saw a 3D printer at school a couple of days ago, it was slow though.
How much did it cost?

[sammyc]

As for what I intend to print; things, lots of things.

How about a 3D printer.. it's the next logical step surely

Good luck nice work area btw.

[Jellyfish]

A pizza to celebrate the momentous achievement of building this contraption!

[Frankenfurter]

How about a 3D printer.. it's the next logical step surely

Good luck nice work area btw.

Haha. How could you refuse?!

And yeah, good job. Extremely jealous now.

[kompukare]

Good luck nice work area btw.

Someone's been to Ikea as I recognise that desk (think they call that system Galant) and the shelves.

DDY: Great project btw. Always wanted CNC router but while I would need a whole garage for that, a 3d printer requires a lot less space. But I do not have any actual use for one of course.

[Frankenfurter]

Seems to me like one of those things where even if you didn't have a use for it before you had it, you'd find a million uses once you'd built one.

For me it would probably replace using epoxy putty to replace parts of things that I break or lose all the time, but I'm sure there'd be other uses too.

[DDY]

Welcome to my lab, do not touch my calculator.



This is what my battle station looked like a week ago, I needed more room to work so I moved the DAW and fitted some shelving.

Btw, Ikea rocks.

Back on the 3D printer, I didn't get a chance to work on it today, but yesterday, I managed to complete virtually everything except for the hot end. Once that goes in I can fire the thing up and hopefully start the calibration process.

How about a 3D printer.. it's the next logical step surely

I guess these 3D printers aren't called a RepRap for nothing

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

3D printed Moose figurines.

[sammyc]

I guess these 3D printers aren't called a RepRap for nothing

I was waaay behind there, might've known

[herulach]

kudos to you for getting one, I desperately want one, but, like my arduino gear I suspect it would get played with for a few days then left in a drawer.

[peterb]

kudos to you for getting one, I desperately want one, but, like my arduino gear I suspect it would get played with for a few days then left in a drawer.

Sounds like me It is looking at me from the corner of my desk (although my three sensor max min thermometer is useful )

[TheAnimus]

I'd recommend looking at the Fez stuff. It's simply a lot easier to get something moderately complex going. It doesn't have half as much fussing about required. This is kind of the thing I have with arduino, it's too in the middle between high level abstracted and low level. I would sooner reach for the incredibly cheap PICs over it.

[DDY]

Update.

It has been a few days since I've completed the 3D printer build but I haven't printed anything, successfully. No pictures this time , I wanted to take photos of some of the more interesting failures, but my frustration each time has kept me from doing so.

Here's the story since completion.

The printer fired up without a hitch on its first power up, initial calibration went well, e.g. setting the end stops. A few more fine adjustments and I attempted my first print, a ready designed case by Velleman to enclose the controller board, which was pretty much a failure right off the bat. Everything past this point has been an uphill struggle.

The issues so far:

Poor bed adhesion and curling edges
- First layer fails to adhere to the bed and filament gets dragged
- Model loses bed adhesion mid print and the entire model shifts
- Edges of the model lift, leading to adhesion problems or deforming the model

I think the most significant cause was a uneven bed, I've measured parts of the bed to be ~0.70mm off

I've fixed 99% of the above, I hope, by;
- Using a sheet of glass as a print bed, actually the Ikea SÖRLI mirror which is exactly the right size, placed over the existing heated bed, takes ages to heat up though.
- Increasing bed temperature to 60°C - which is the hottest the K8200 in its current configuration can manage
- Reduced nozzle clearance from 0.25mm to 0.20mm
- And of course, keeping the bed as level of possible

Other things I could try
- Adhesives, hair spray, PVA glue, ABS "glue"
- Acetone to clean print bed rather than IPA
- Blue painters or Kapton tape have
- Higher quality filament, I'm using really cheap PLA off ebay


Inconsistent extrusion
Again, I think I've fixed this one.

- Extruder gears were too tight, so I loosened it,
- Extruder wheel spring was too loose, so I tightened it, duh
- Extruder wheel spring was then too tight, whoops, turns out the sweet spot is inside half a turn of the adjusting wing bolt

There is still a minor problem of poor extrusion at the very beginning of a print, but I can fix this by manually extruding the filament right before a print.

X and Y printing translation error mid print
This is currently the biggest show stopper. I've only just managed to get to this point where I can actually print something, but a few seconds in to the 4th layer the printer will print about 5mm off in both X and Y directions. It has done this with five different models, one of which I designed myself, the others downloaded from Thingiverse which are known to print well. I suspect this is a software issue and I will be investigating it once I can get off FC3:BD, I'm typing this update now because UPlay doesn't keep games updated on the fly, but rather annoyingly incrementally every time I launch a game. The ~260MB update has now completed, brb.

[peterb]

Sorry yo hear about those problems, although it is when things go wrong that you really start learning how they work! That said, I am surprised as Velleman kits are usually pretty good.
Is the firmware upgradeable (assuming the xy registration problem is firmware related). Is it 5mm consistently and in the same direction?

[DDY]

Sorry yo hear about those problems, although it is when things go wrong that you really start learning how they work! That said, I am surprised as Velleman kits are usually pretty good.
Is the firmware upgradeable (assuming the xy registration problem is firmware related). Is it 5mm consistently and in the same direction?

I'm a fan of Velleman kits myself and I'm actually quite pleased with the overall quality of the K8200.

The issues I have are not unique to the K8200, even prebuilt off-the-shelf machines suffer many of the same problems. In fact I would have been very surprised if the printer worked perfectly on the first go.

Yeah, it was frustrating at times, but it's a frustration I know and love, it's part and parcel of this sort of project work, especially projects that I'm inexperienced with. As said, it's a learning process and one which I enjoy.

The firmware is indeed upgradable, I'm currently on V1 and there's a V2 out. Another line of investigation would be the 3D printing host software on the computer, I'm currently using Repetier 0.84 which is a version known to work well with the K8200, there are newer revisions that are also known to be good, I can also use other 3D printing host software but I'll stick to Repetier for now.

I'll be back working on the 3D printer soon, I've finished FC3:BD which was great fun but shorter than I'd expected, but at £2.60 I'm not complaining.

[Tumble]

What are you actually using as a print medium?