Some more progress...
I've got all the wiring run so that everything can move and power on. Not pretty yet. I have 2 of the endstops mounted.
I ended up re-hobbing my extruder drive bolt in order to bring the gears closer to the extruder body. I did this because in order to clear the belt clamp bolts the extruder had to be moved as far away from the vertical piece of the X carriage as possible. This increased the cantilever effect and I didn't like it.
Along those same lines, I can tell already I'm going to have oscillation problems on the X carriage because of the weight of the motor being suspended so far out. When I jog the axis I can see the extruder body wiggle around. I think it'll work, but the part quality is going to suck until I can design a better X carriage with an integrated extruder body.
I'm also seeing issues on the Y axis. There seems to be a lot of play between the v-wheels and the extrusion. As best as I could tell I had the eccentric spacer adjusted correctly, when I was working on that. I can see a little bit of "splay" on the eccentric spacer, so it looks like there's enough lateral force to push it off the vertical. I may also not have the bolts torqued down enough, but I am leery of over-torquing things because the PLA will just crush. Adjusting the bolts on the Y is a bit of a pain because I have a piece of plate steel mounted on top of the printed carriage to carry the HPB, and this covers up the bolt heads.
Anyway... Despite all these issues, it does print!
- Printed ORDbot Printing!
Amidst the chaos, a new printer is born. You can see I'm still missing the crossbrace on top of the verticals, but at low speeds any impact that has is lost in the noise of the X carriage/extruder assy vibrating.
- First Print Results
Here's the results of my first test print. The surface finish is, as expected, a bit rough. Other than that it came out fine. Sorry about the rotation, not sure how to fix that.
In the coming days I need to print some brackets to mount the endstops more professionally, mount the head fan, clean up the wiring, and work on a better X carriage.
I do intend to release the files after one more round of revisions once I work out any bugs that crop up. No timeline.