It has been a year since my last report. (The whole site seems quieter lately.)
One of my friends has five 3D printers. He often says, "I wanted a tool, not a hobby." He is lying, of course. He's always got a project underway to build, upgrade, redesign or repair one of his printers. OTOH, with five printers, he almost always has one that's working. (-:
I try to keep my printer a tool, not a hobby. Sometimes I succeed.
About last October, my hot end broke. The PEEK tube got brittle from heat and snapped in two. I used that as an excuse to upgrade to an E3D v5 hot end.
After that, I was plagued with wobbly prints. I upgraded the delta arms to Trick Laser's carbon fiber arms around February. That definitely helped.
http://www.tricklaser.com/Carbon-Fiber- ... M-CFTX.htm The Trick Laser arms are actually heavier than the nylon arms that came with my printer, but they're much stiffer, and the bearings have both less friction and less free play.
But the wobbles came back. About a month ago, I realized that the mount I was using can't keep the print head from tilting in the -Y direction. So I upgraded it by printing a second copy of the top half and supporting the E3D in three layers instead of two. (see below) Now it seems to be good.
Here is the mount I was using.
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:137140 It has two pieces. The upper piece constrains the hot end in the X and Y directions, and the lower piece constrains it in X and Z. It has very poor mechanical advantage constraining it in Y.
I duplicated the top piece, and now the head is held in a sandwich of upper - lower - upper. The Y movement is better constrained in that configuration, and the wobbles seem to be gone. I usually run with 3600 mm/sec/sec acceleration, so the hot end mount is working hard.
I would still like to get a metal mount some day for even better precision.
Aside from those things, there've been the usual maintenance activities: re-surfacing the bed (I use white glue), re-leveling the bed, tightening things, cleaning things, tweaking the Slic3r settings.
My software stack has not changed much. Since it's "not a hobby", I'm still running the same version of Repetier Host and Slic3r I started with. I've recompiled my firmware a few times with tweaked settings, but it's still the same Repetier-MAX release. I've added NetFabb to my workflow. I've dabbled with Sketchup and FreeCAD, but I keep coming back to OpenSCAD when I want to get something done.
I've used ABS exclusively to this point, though I have some Taulman 618 and some NinjaFlex waiting for me to get experimenting.
Right now I'm printing some pieces for my laser cutter. If it comes out okay, look for an update over there next.
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