Problems with new ATI Ord Bot build

[W3DRK]

Greetings! So last month I purchased the Ord Bot mechatronics kit from ATI. The assembly was fairly straight forward but I ran into two big issues that I thought I'd share and see if anyone has any comments or suggestions.

The biggest issue is with the Delrin V-wheels. There is at least a quarter millimeter of play where the bearings seat into the pockets so the wheels can slide back and forth on the bearings. It seems like they shipped me wheels with about .5mm step but used 1mm shims. One of the wheels formed enough run-out that it quickly "polished" low spots in the Makerslide on my X axis. Which brings me to my 2nd issue.

The Makerslide they provided is not Anodized and has a soft mill finish. I keep the V-Wheels adjusted just tight enough to eliminate any play, but every wheels seems to pickup oxide from the Makerslide and eventually start building up clumps of it. Every piece of Makerslide was also cut about 5mm too short.

I contacted ATI several times to ask for help with the V-wheels but haven't received any satisfactory response. I eventually purchased a whole new set of V-wheels and a length of Makerslide from inventables to rebuild the printer. The Makerslide they provided is MUCH nicer than the ATI stuff, but unfortunately the wheels had a very similar issue. Inventables was great and sent a 2nd set of wheels so between the two I was able to get 14 perfect wheels to get my Ord Bot going again.

So I'm curious, is it usually difficult to find the Delrin V-wheels with steps that match the shim, or am I being overly picky? Has anyone else run into these issues with the ATI kit? At first $299 seemed like great deal, but in the long run I would have been better off buying the materials myself and getting the laser cut pieces from eBay.

Thanks!

[fulg]

I had the same problem with my kit, all of my V-Wheels from ATI had this play in them. For X and Z this is not a big problem (though it is annoying) but for Y it is absolutely crippling, as this play will prevent you from leveling the print bed. In the end I had to order new wheels (not from ATI). The Makerslide was fine on my kit, and the dimensions were exact.

I was also lured in by the low price of the ATI kit but there is a bit of work involved in getting it running correctly. I am unfortunately not equipped to cut Makerslide (no workshop!). If I were to do this again I would probably get a kit from RepRapDiscount instead and save some aggravation.

There is a thread on the X-Carve forums about a similar problem, although my wheels were never as bad as the video shows.

You should post some pictures! New ORDBot builds seem to be fairly rare nowadays.

Cheers,
Ben.

[W3DRK]

Hey!

I figured this thread would never get any attention. Thanks for the post!

Re the ATI kit- yeah in the long run it probably would have been cheaper if I had skipped the ATI kit and just built from scratch using the Inventables Makerslide and v-wheels, and got the laser cut parts on eBay. Purchasing the ATI kit was actually an impulse buy because until spotting it on their site while looking for a stepper motor, I had no idea OrdBots even existed! Once I saw how solid they looked vs my acrylic Prusa i3, I couldn't resist ordering one! I'm guessing the popularity of cheap Prusa i3s flooding the market has stolen some of the spotlight from OrdBots.

Dimensionally the ATI Makerslide was fine besides all being a little too short, but the soft mill finish was detrimental to the X axis once the wobbly V-wheel started wearing it away. A few thousandths of wear translated into enough movement at the nozzle to make my glass bed appear wavy. The Inventables anodized Makerslide is gorgeous and I'm fortunate to have access to a machine shop at work so the cuts were done perfectly on a mill. Besides looking nice, the anodized hardening should prevent that kind of wear in the future should another v-wheel decide to start wobbling.

Eventually everything turned out great and my OrdBot has been flawless since rebuilding with better quality materials. I cut the Z-axis Makerslide pieces 30mm longer then specified so I can easily print at least 200mm tall objects now which is a nice bonus.

I will certainly get some pictures of it to upload.

Cheers!

[fulg]

I don't recall how I came across the ORDBot but I was also looking at those flimsy acrylic Prusa frames at the time. The all-metal construction certainly caught my attention, as well as the amazing prototype pictures on the Wiki (aka "where are the wires?"). In practice my build didn't turn out as nice, but I'm still working on it. Biggest issue is only having a single printer, so upgrades have to be carefully planned...

Cheers,
Ben.