Trident - 300^3 LDO kit + PIF

[noble hatch]

This will be my first 3D printer. This printer will help me to complete various personal projects, and give me another manufacturing capability.

I couldn't bring myself to buy a retail printer. They all have drawbacks.

Building a Voron from a kit seems like the appropriate way to get started into 3D printing, to orientate oneself to the art in short order.

Initially I wanted the 350mm CBT Trident kit from MPX but my payment wasn't going through... so I went with the 300^3 LDO kit instead.

The 300^3 LDO Trident kit (Rev D), with "Rapido 2 plus High Flow (PT1000)," and printed (functional) parts from PIF, arrived a few weeks ago and I have made some progress since then.

The kit boxes were very dirty. Carrying the boxes from the front gate to my house soiled my clothes a bit.

Fortunately there were clean boxes inside of the dirty boxes so I didn't have to bring the dirty ones in the house.

My build area is a 4'x8' table.

I started by removing any burrs on the ends of the extrusions. To do this I used a finishing stone. Some of the extrusions had more burrs than others. I've not seen this part of the process mentioned by others, but I do think it helps with both the rigidity and squareness of the frame.

I assembled the frame with the help of some small granite surface plates and some clamps, 123 blocks, and a 6" vise jaw plate. The surface plates are 9"x12"x3", available from grizzly.com for like $60 with free shipping, so rather inexpensive. The frame ended up being very square, within .5mm corner to corner, as far as I can tell with a tape measure.

Since I have gage blocks I used those to position the rear vertical column.

*Take note that this column is offset from the upper portion of the frame, as mentioned on page 51 of the assembly manual.

Thank you to my PIF provider Trippinonaduck.
The PIF parts are great not only for the convenience and the fair price but because I get to see and feel top quality printed parts from the get go, which can serve as a basis for comparison for my own prints once I get to printing.
There are quite a lot of parts!

Next it was time to do the heat set inserts. The LDO kit comes with a brass heat set insert tool. I installed it into an old Hakko soldering iron which I don't use anymore since I've upgraded to JBC soldering iron. The brass tool had a loose fit over the ceramic heating element of the iron, but despite that it heats up just fine. I set the iron to around 230°C.

Success. Installing heat set inserts is easier than I thought it would be.

I went with "Cosmic Mag Gray" for the accent parts, by the way, which I think looks real nice. I wanted a subdued industrial look rather than something bright and flashy.

Assembling the A and B drives and idlers. The included spacer tool did not position the pulleys correctly, so they needed to be adjusted on center by eye.

[noble hatch]

Time to grease the rails.

Wearing rubber gloves is advised during this process.

The rails were quite clean and free of oil but I cleaned them with IPA anyway prior to greasing.

For the grease I went with Mobilith SHC 220, which should perform better and support higher temperatures than EP2.
The SHC 220 has a synthetic base, whereas EP2 has a mineral oil base.

I had some small syringes on hand, purchased from Mcmaster-Carr.
To fill the syringe I plunged it into the grease and slowly pulled back on the plunger. This worked just fine.
I wiped the excess grease off of the syringe with my gloved finger and scraped that back into the grease tube.

I injected the grease through a mounting hole, wiped off the excess, moved the carriage up and down the rail, then repeated this process one more time.
Then excess grease was wiped off of the rails and removed from the mounting holes.

Mounting the rails.

The LDO kit includes "nut bars" for mounting the rails, to use instead of roll-in T nuts, but I did not use them.
Up to this point I did not have the LDO documentation open side by side with the Trident assembly manual.
If the nut bars are to be used they need to be installed during the frame assembly process.
It seems that there are plenty of extra roll-ins included so the oversight was inconsequential.

I recommend installing the T-nuts and rails with the frame laying flat, so that you don't have to fight gravity during the process.

Edit July/25/25: If you use the LDO nut bar for the X axis it will add 69 grams of weight to the gantry vs using roll-in nuts. Eight T-nuts weigh 10 grams, eight roll-in nuts weigh 20 grams, and the LDO nut bar weights 89 grams.

The rails, motor mounts, stepper motors, and feet are installed.

Then the X axis / gantry.

[marsh locust]

Welcome! Enjoy the build!

[noble hatch]

Thanks. I am keeping it in mind that I should maintain a neutral or positive attitude as I go, even if / when I hit some setbacks. You know, just roll with the punches.

[marsh locust]

hehe, i know the feeling. I sometimes need to take breaks when nothing goes my way in printing or building..

[noble hatch]

Made some progress today.

Routed the belts. The front idlers gave me some trouble until I realized I could see in there if I used a flashlight and positioned the idler like this.

Got the belts pulled and clamped and trimmed.

Edit 7/11/25: The belt ends can be cut a little longer than shown in my end result picture, and the excess length can be folded over into the grooves in the toolhead. See [this post](#voron_trident_questions message) for an illustration.

I could not find the pulley in the LDO kit to make the Z endstop. Eventually I found it in the "Electronics 2/2" box. It was already installed in a part printed by LDO.

[noble hatch]

Finally at this point I realize that I need to have several LDO guides open: "Build Notes/FAQ," "Printed Parts Guide," and the "wiring guide." Where are the finer details about the Z endstop mentioned? In the wiring guide, of course.

The wiring guide also mentions insulating the Z probe, so I dismounted it and did that. Two layers on the front, with a hole cut for the LED, and one layer on each side.

Next came the bed frame and mounting the bed.

Initially when I mounted the bed frame one of the mounts was quite a bit out of position and the screw was canted. I did the "loosen and retighten" procedure a few times, as mentioned on page 157 of the assembly manual, until all of the screws were pretty well centered in their mounts.

Finally I mounted the bed, the Z endstop, and the "Bed Wago Mount."
That's all for today.

I just noticed that the LDO wiring guide says to trim back the insulation from the bottom edges of the Z probe, so I will need to do that. It says this in small font with poor contrast under the picture of the Z probe. Easy to notice here on my big 32" monitor, but not so much on the little laptop out in the shop.

[noble hatch]

Today was fun despite having to do some things over to get it right. Didn't bother me at all, so it looks like I've managed to embrace the right attitude.

I installed these heat-set inserts in situ because I missed them before.

Mounting the Rapido 2 HF in the printhead took a moment to figure out.

These two threads helped me:
https://github.com/VoronDesign/Voron-Stealthburner/issues/116
https://www.teamfdm.com/forums/topic/2526-stealthburner-and-rapido-2-mount/

There are instructions in the Voron github for putting the Rapido V2 printhead together: https://github.com/VoronDesign/Voron-Stealthburner/tree/main/STLs/Stealthburner/Printheads/phaetus_rapido_v2

Oops, those wires aren't supposed to be routed externally:

At the end of the day, I've got a StealthBurner.

[dreamy peak]

Your hotend fan is on backwards

Sticker side is where the air comes out of. Right now it’s blowing out instead of blowing in to cool the hotend.

[lapis gazelle]

Looking good. You do need to fix the fan like XXXTooprox said though.

[noble hatch]

Thank you, I have corrected that.

After some debate I've decided not to do the inverted electronics mod, so the printer is flipped upside down now.

EDIT 6/16/25:
The reason I decided against doing the inverted electronics mod is because I thought there was not an easy way to mount the cable duct to keep all of the wiring tidy, and I also wasn't sure if the wiring needed to be done differently, or if I might end up with some short wires. I did not know at the time that there is a bottom panel to the electronics bay, and after installing it, the cable duct can be mounted to that. Mounting this panel requires the skirts and panel clips though, both of which are cosmetic parts, not included with function parts sets. The wire routing will be identical to non-inverted wiring. See page 258 and 259 of the Trident assembly manual (Ver. 23-07-07) regarding the bottom panel. As @sudden onyx [mentioned](#voron_trident_questions message), the bottom panel is not required to do inverted electronics mod, it's only if you want wire management/cable raceways, there needs to be something for those to attach to.

Thanks to @still stag for [answering my question](#voron_trident_questions message) about this.

And thanks to @potent field for the Trident Inverted Electronics mod. Did I want to do the Inverted Electronics mod? Of course I wanted to do the Inverted mod, who doesn't want the inverted Electronics mod? If I build a 350, it's going in there for sure. The only question is BOM WHEN?

Installing the deck panel came next. The protective sticker on the acrylic did not want to come off easily. Towards the end of removing the sticker from the first side I experimented with some isopropyl alcohol and it helped.

For the second side I wiped down the whole sticker with alcohol and was able to get it off in one piece. Maybe water would work too?

[noble hatch]

Ready for wiring.

[noble hatch]

The wiring is done. Almost forgot to put the copper heatsink on the RPi.

FYI this wire mapping picture in the LDO guide is incorrect, the Z STOP wire should go through the panel cutout to the left of the rear Z stepper, to be fed into the Z chain.

Thanks to @lament halo and @south linden for verifying this.

[noble hatch]

The printer is standing upright again and now it's time to figure out the cable chains. The LDO cable chain guide doesn't have a lot to say on the matter. Jonas Hietala's blog offers some insight. Four extra links are included in the kit. One or two links need to be added to the Z chain, and one or two to each X and Y chain.

For now I've added one extra link to the Z chain, two links to the Y chain, and one link to the X chain. I am not sure yet if the Z chain will run out of travel and bind.

I would have preferred a couple more links to be included with the kit but maybe I can get by with what was provided.

[noble hatch]

The X axis cable chain did not have the necessary freedom of motion, it would pull up on the mounting bracket when at the extent of the travel.

But included in my printed parts was another bracket that is slightly taller, and with that one there is no binding.

At this point I started looking at the wiring on the toolhead, so more about the cable chains later...

It seems that LDO does not provide instructions for installing the Nighthawk SB toolboard.

There is an LDO guide pertaining to StealthBurner, and the installation of the fan PCB is detailed here: https://www.ldomotion.com/p/guide/Voron-Stealthburner-Kit-Revision-C

Here is a relevant youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCIwZRPYMZ8

The Fan PCB mounts like this in the SB main body:

This printed part (CW2 PCB spacer) is necessary to mount the NSB toolhead PCB to StealthBurner.

M3x8 SHCS work to bolt up the PCB.

But there is significant misalignment between the boards:

And also the fan PCB connectors sit proud of the SB main body, preventing it from sitting flush on the carriage.

With that I am calling it a day. Hopefully these parts will fit together better after messing around with them some more.

[noble hatch]

To get the fan PCB to sit lower I removed some excess glue from the underside with a razor and a file .

I also removed the raised portions of the fan housing that are under the fan PCB connectors.

The little square protrusion on the fan housing was removed.

Now the fan PCB sits flush with the StealthBurner main body.

[noble hatch]

I removed even more material from the fan housing, and also trimmed the wire connectors a little.

The connectors on the fan PCB sit flat against the fan housing now, but a remaining issue is when the PCB screws are tightened, the fan PCB tilts at an unfavorable angle due to the uneven distribution of connectors on the PCB. To solve this I shimmed the PCB with some fiber washers I had on hand. The washers are #4 size, 1/64" thick. Three of them in a stack were placed under the PCB on one side, with the PCB screw going through them. The other side did not need shims.

[noble hatch]

Lastly I added some small zip ties to the wires.

The fitment between the NSB toolhead PCB and the fan PCB is pretty good now.

The StealthBurner main body (the front face of the SB) installs gracefully if it is tilted slightly to connect the pins, then pushed into place.

[noble hatch]

The hood doesn't close due to interference from the probe connector so I must have the wrong one installed.

That's better.

[noble hatch]

The stock Revo Voron hotend has the correct wire connectors (ferrules and JST-XH-2P) to interface with the NSB toolhead PCB:

I bought my kit from Fabreeko and opted for the $10 Phaetus Rapido 2.0 HF deal. The wires coming out of the hotend do not have the necessary wire connectors. Extension cables are included which do have the correct wire connectors.

I will take this opportunity to buy some ferrule crimpers and JST-XH connectors in order to wire this properly.

[noble hatch]

Back to the subject of cable chains...

As mentioned in the LDO cable chain guide, the end links need to be modified to allow articulation. Normally the end link and the link connected to it are not able to articulate.

The way you modify the links depends on which link is being modified and which direction it needs rotate and how far. To modify, the flange can be snipped, and/or the square boss can be trimmed or removed.

These cable chains are kind of odd in that they don't like to lay flat.

When the end link is screwed down, the next link in the chain is unable to rotate enough to lay flat. The end link would need to be a little taller to allow the next link enough rotation.

A shim under the end link allows the chain to lay flatter. Probably 1mm would suffice. I had some 1/16" [1.5mm] acetal sheet on hand and made some shims with that.

I also modified the end links to allow a little downward rotation.

[noble hatch]

The M3x6 FHCS are not long enough to be used with the shim in place so until I can get some M3x8 FHCS I have installed M3x8 BHCS.

[noble hatch]

The extent of the collision between the Y chain with the "XY cable bridge" is reduced after the mods. Once there are wires in the channel I don't think it will rub but we'll see.

[noble hatch]

Not including the end links, I ended up with 23 links in X, and 22 in Y and Z.

[noble hatch]

Changed the SB door once again, for the LDO one with an integrated thermistor mount. The kit did not include the thermistor but I ordered a PT1000 from Triangle-Lab.

EDIT: actually the kit did include a chamber thermistor, but it is not listed on the parts list.

[noble hatch]

Buttoned up the wires on the SB. The stepper wires wrap around the motor.

Finished the XY chains. The Steve Builds "LDO Voron Trident Beta Kit Build (Part 4)" video offered some insight.

Finished the corner wire loom. Scissors and a lighter match helped to clean up the ends of the braided loom.

[noble hatch]

Finished the Z chain and bed wiring. It was a little tricky to get everything tucked away and tied off.

Flipped the printer on its side to finish the electronics bay.

The extra wire length at the corner was bundled and tied off in the open space there.

[terse oracle]

I have not mounted the thermistor included with my Trident kit yet. Without any markings or mention in the BOM I don't know what to use in the printer.cfg file.

[dreamy peak]

It goes on top of the tool head connected to the stealth burner cable cover

Plugs into the sb tool head board aswell

[terse oracle]

So obvious when you know where to look. So easy to overlook when you don't

[dreamy peak]

Yup, happened to me aswell until somone else pointed it out

[noble hatch]

I made some new cable chain risers out of 1/32" [.8mm] thick black FR4 sheet, to replace the 1/16" thick ones I made previously. 1/32" is thick enough to allow the 2nd link to lay flat.

One of them is for the Z chain, so that I can tie off the wires. I had snipped the cable moor off of that end bracket.

But I decided not to use that Z chain riser. The tie off extension seems to be the lowest point on the bed frame and would probably limit my Z travel.

So this is how the cables are tied off:

[noble hatch]

Connected the FRAME PE wire. I used an M5x10 BHCS and two of the locking washers. The M5x10 screw bottoms out in the extrusion, establishing ground without needing to sand the extrusion. The two locking washers compress enough to exert force on the ring terminal so that it does not wiggle.

I checked for continuity around the frame. Some of the extrusions do have continuity despite them being anodized.

Mounted the fan splicing PCB to the frame. There is not enough room between my cable ducting and the PCB to connect wires, so I installed it on a DIN mount instead.

[noble hatch]

Installed the Leviathan fan jumpers to the 24V position and put the top cover on the LDO USB adapter PCB.

I'm pretty sure that I removed the "JP1" jumper from Leviathan when following the instructions to remove all of the voltage selection jumpers.

The Leviathan manual makes no mention of JP1 or what it does.

Searching the Voron discord about the matter reveals that this jumper enables a 120R resistor for CANbus termination.
(Thanks @dreamy quest for [this post](#voron_2_discussion message) and @hollow panther for [this post](#voron_2_discussion message).)

I reinstalled the jumper for safe keeping.

[noble hatch]

Various crimping tools and some genuine JST-XH connectors have arrived. I can complete the StealthBurner wiring now.

The tools are: hex ferrule crimper, square ferrule crimper, terminal crimper, JST-XH crimper, and wire strippers that can strip wires up to 28 AWG.

The PT1000 gets the JST-XH connector, the heater gets the ferrules.

The tool I acquired to do the JST-XH crimps is the "iCrimp SN-01BM Ratchet Crimper." I think it's a good tool because these are probably good crimps, achieved on the first try.

The square ferrule crimper's mechanism is a bit sloppy and didn't really result in a square crimp, but the crimp is solid. The hex crimper does a better job on these 22 AWG ferrules.

The wires are connected and the hood is closed.

There is but a single cable coming off of the Nighthawk-SB toolboard and being fed through the cable chain. Nice.

Just how COOL does StealthBurner look with that thermistor mounted on top?

[noble hatch]

One other minor thing to mention about SealthBurner: M3x25 screws are called out in the assembly manual to install the main body (front cover) to the printhead. If the upper right screw is replaced with an M3x20 SHCS, the screw terminates flush on the back side, leaving more room to tuck extra wire length in that pocket.

[noble hatch]

Powered up the build. No magic smoke.

[noble hatch]

Acquired a card reader:

Used Pi Imager to put Raspberri Pi OS Lite (32-bit) on the micro SD card. SSH is enabled via the configuration settings.

[noble hatch]

Initial boot / install of RPi OS Lite went ok.

Next I blooted MainsailOS but had networking difficulties and gave up on this. The mainsailos.local and tridentpi.local addresses did not work to bring up the interface, and I did not have the actual printer IP at this time.

Initially I wanted to keep the printer entirely offline but this approach is not documented, so at this point I connected the printer and a laptop to a router with ethernet cables.

Then I ran The kiauh script and it worked flawlessly. A real time saver, this script.

I used PUTTY to SSH to the RPi via an old windows laptop.
Entering the printer's name in the host name field (tridentpi) and clicking "open" is all that is needed to bring up the terminal.

The Voron docs have a guide about ssh: https://docs.vorondesign.com/build/software/ssh.html

With the terminal up, I followed the instructions on the kiauh git page and executed the script.

Installed Klipper, Moonraker, Mainsail, and finally KlipperScreen.

[noble hatch]

KlipperScreen shows the printer's IP in the networking tab. Entering this IP into a browser on my laptop brings up Mainsail.

There was an error shown on klipperscreen:

I attempted to fix this by editing the mainsail.cfg file, (I changed the top most 0.0.0.0 line...) but after doing so the printer became unreachable. Rather than figure out how to access and edit the file from the terminal, I opted to reinstall everything from scratch. So I installed RPi OS Lite again. This time I performed sudo apt update and sudo apt upgrade before continuing. This updates the operating system with the latest updates.

Next I ran the kiauh script again and as before it went swimmingly.

[odd vector]

I ran into the issue of wire guides on inverted electronics, found these din rail brackets that seemed to work well. Also I too forgot the T nut bars so I had to take my frame apart to get them in!

I started building an LDO trident 300 recently as well. It’s interesting to see some common mistakes during assembly!

[noble hatch]

That's an interesting solution. If you've got the skirts and other cosmetic parts, the wire guides can be mounted to the bottom panel. (see page 258 of the assembly manual)

Good luck with your build!

[noble hatch]

To flix the klipper error, 127.0.0.0/8 was added to moonraker.conf.

Thanks to @spring rune for helping me with this.

[noble hatch]

Once mainsail was up and running I started to edit the printer config to get rid of the error notifications. The correct config to use for the Trident Rev D kit is mentioned at the end of the LDO Rev D wiring guide.

Not much needs to be changed to get rid of the error messages except for uncommenting some lines related to the printer size.

Since I am using the "Rapido 2 plus High Flow (PT1000)" hotend, under the "extruder" section of the printer config the thermistor type needed to be changed to PT1000 and the max temp set to 350.

[noble hatch]

The wrong time was being displayed on klipperscreen.
To change this I SSH'd the Pi and executed the timedatectl command:
To list all valid time zones: timedatectl list-timezones
To set: sudo timedatectl set-timezone <timeszone>

Klipper logs were also showing incorrect time stamps. This was due to the resist browser fingerprinting settings in Librewolf spoofing the time zone. Opening Mainsail in a different browser solved that problem.

[spring rune]

timezone setting is easier from raspi-config, fyi (at least on actual pis)

[noble hatch]

Good to know. This is the first I've heard of raspi-config.

[noble hatch]

Next I worked through the Initial Startup Checks from the Voron docs.

Everything responded well and moved in the correct direction.
Homing X and Y went fine.

And then there is Z.

Before the "Define 0,0 Point (V1, Trident, V2, Legacy)" step, I homed Z so that I could jog the bed up and down.

Initially the position of my Z endstop ended up being X: 173 Y: 300.

I did not find the "Define 0,0 Point" section of the docs to be particularly well articulated, but maybe you'll have better time with that....
Fortunately it is a simple enough process.

In the end, my values ended up being:
X: 300
Y: 307

(position_max and position_endstop have the same value.)
The y travel needed to be increased by 7mm in order to bring the travel closer to the front edge of the build plate.

At x 300, the toolhead was crashing into the left xy joint by about .3mm.
To fix this I took the XY endstop pod off and reseated the PCB, pushing it to the right side. Likewise the pod was pushed to the right when reinstalled. This moved the X home position 1mm to the right, fixing the crash issue.

After this adjustment the Z endstop position was changed to X: 172 Y: 300.

Next Z_TILT_ADJUST was performed with the extruder at 245C and the bed at 100C as per the docs. It worked fine, usually requiring 1/5 retries. Note that the spring steel build plate needs to be in place, the inductive probe does not have much sensitivity to aluminum.

Then Z offset adjustment was performed, using a piece of paper.
Following the note: "Important: Klipper assumes that this process is being done cold. If being performed hot, do an additional TESTZ Z=-0.1 before accepting" brings the nozzle directly against the build plate, since a piece of paper is .1mm thick.

[noble hatch]

The Z_ENDSTOP_CALIBRATE process gave me some trouble. Every time I performed the procedure, as per the docs, the value would come out wildly different and the nozzle would be either several mm too high or low relative to the "toolhead position."

Eventually I noticed that the Toolhead position in Mainsail said incremental, so I executed G90 to switch to absolute.
I then ran the PID tuning command for both the extruder and heater_bed.

I performed Z_ENDSTOP_CALIBRATE several more times. Eventually the value became perfectly consistent.

[noble hatch]

Extruder calibration was next.

The default rotation_distance value in the LDO config needed to be adjusted by 1%, i.e.default_value*.99.