reprap

New printers

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Well I’ve got two new printers, one still is waiting to ship the other is here and printing.

I backed the CR-6 SE on kickstarter and now I’m just waiting for it to ship along with the add-ons I selected.

  • The other printer is an Ender 3 V2 which I’ve been hearing lots of good things about, especially that it’s a 32 bit board with silent stepper drivers. It arrived yesterday and went together in less than an hour and here’s my first impressions of it.

  • The instruction manual seems to be much better than the original ender 3, much less confusing on how to put things together so that was very welcome.

  • Typical excellent packing, nothing was damaged or missing.

  • First test print was perfect, very encouraging.

  • I love the color screen, and the menu system is laid out very well.

  • Don’t like the fact that the creality slicer is Windows only.

  • But using Cura with the default ender 3 profile is printing absolutely gorgeous prints, so that’s REALLY nice.

  • Some people have complained about the weak bed springs, but so far I’ve not had any issues.

  • Hooking up Octoprint had one issue, the temp readouts are all wonky, but someone in the octoprint community has already posted a fix for it and it worked great.

Looking forward to really putting this printer through its paces.

This may be a printer that I don’t upgrade. The only possible upgrades I can think of would be a BLTouch, which it has a connector already in the board but right now I’m not having any leveling issues.

The other is something that I probably will install and that’s the filament runout sensor. I’ve found that to be very convenient in a couple of different ways.

Finally gave the Mosquito HotEnd by Slice Engineering a try and switching to Cura for Slicing

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Well I needed to replace a hotend on my printer and I decided to go ahead and give the Mosquito hotend by Slice Engineering a try. It is quite a bit more expensive than other hotends but after installing it and using it for about a week I now totally understand the benefits (at least for me that is).

  1. The melt zone is SMALL. I’m talking like 2-3 mm at most. This means you can really cut down the retraction on your slicing.

  2. Having the very small melt zone also means I was able to switch from Direct drive back to a bowden setup. I switched to a bowden setup and just dealt with the ringing in my print because of the weight, also the filament path was not ideal especially since i’ve installed a filament sensor. Switching to a bowden makes for a much cleaner setup IMHO.

  3. Simple install. I was able to use a minimalist hotend mount (I’m using the groovemount adapter) so my x-carriage is MUCH cleaner than it used to be. Also printing the mount (even though I only had to do it once) was very fast.

  4. Probably the biggest feature I love about this hotend is how simple it is to change the nozzle. I just use the wrench and voila, the nozzle is off and back on in under 30 seconds probably. And I don’t have to juggle a hot nozzle or use another pair of pliers or wrench to hold the heat break. I’ve been switching nozzles now a lot more than I ever have in the past based on what I’m printing, not just if I have a lot of things to print that justifies a nozzle change.

  5. Being able to print up to 450C is nice, I got the Slice Engineering cartridge and thermistor and now there’s even support built in to Marlin for their thermistor cartridge.

About the only thing I don’t like is that the nozzles they sell are 6mm instead of 7mm like the majority of the E3D nozzles and clones out there. But I already got an adapter for their torque wrench so I’ve got that covered as well.

Bumblebee II is running again

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I finally got both my printers running again, the Hippie was pretty easy, it just needed a new hotend as the thermistor on the current one (which is over a year old) broke.

The Bumblebee II I was switching back to the E3D V6 hotend, and I was finally able to get it to print reliably and consistently.  I think the whole issue was related to my extruder, up until a few months ago I had been using a Maker Gear geared extruder and it had tons of torque so adjusting it wasn't that critical.  I switched to a Bulldog XL after the planetary gear was worn out in the Maker Gear extruder, and I had been struggling with getting consistent prints.  Half way through the print the filament would stop feeding, or it would strip it out.  I did some experiments with temperature and filament tension on the Bulldog and finally got the right settings.  I have to run the E3D a little hotter probably because of the active cooling, but the prints have been coming out great finally.

I started working on the onboard power system for the lighting and the Raspberry Pi and the lighting sections are working fine, but the Pi doesn't seem to be working correctly.  I need to pull out a monitor and keyboard and test it tonight, I'm not sure if it's not delivering enough current, but I also ordered 1.5a 7812 and 7805 chips from Mouser just so they won't run as hot.
 

Last parts (I hope) ordered for the 3DR printer

I placed the order for the last bits and pieces I need for the 3DR. I wasn't able to make the orange filament yet, I have to make a chopper so I can chop up the filament and extrude it twice to get the uniform color in the filament, and that should be ready mid-November. So I ordered a spool or orange filament, the rods and ball ends for the actuators, and some other bits and pieces which should arrive tomorrow. Then I'll be able to start printing the parts and beginning the assembly!!!

My next printer

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I've decided to build a 3DR which is a deltabot designed by RichRap. The nice thing about it is that it only requires some bearings, almost everything else is either printed or off the shelf bolts. I'm going to make some red filament to print the parts for it, and I'm really looking forward to having a small portable FAST printer.

3D printing status

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Well, haven't done much lately, but I'm finally getting back to working on my printers.

The hippie has been running with a .7 nozzle ever since it got clogged up with some cheap plastic and I drilled it out. But I think it's time to put another .4 back on it. It's nice how fast it prints, but it is nice to be able to print the detailed objects on either printer instead of relying on the bumblebee II. Also I finally had to adjust the settings for the bed leveling, had to adjust it .2 mm as it's apparently shifted ever so slight on the carriage. But other than that it's been working awesome.

The bumblebee II is not up right now, I had gotten the E3D v5 hotend and was experimenting with the quick release carriage, but I really don't like it. I also had the thermistor pop out and had a thermal runaway on the hotend. It doesn't appear to have damaged anything, but I decided to go ahead and upgrade it to the V6 of the E3D, as it has a more secure fastening for the thermistor and is almost the same size as the J-head. I'm also going back to the maker gear x-carriage with a wider opening that fits the E3D better. The rumba board has been working awesome and allowed me to move up to a 24v power supply.