"Pooron" V2 (E3+old delta+ <$200 CAD=Voron?)

[weary shuttle]

Problem:
So, first off, I'm a cheapskate! Probably way too cheap to even be in Voron circles, but I was becoming aware that my Ender 3 V1 wasn't exactly modern, despite adding Klipper, a silent motherboard, and dual-geared direct drive.

The siren song of Bambu tempted me with its promises of ease and just-workingness, but they weren't cheap enough, and I didn't want something that closed down!

I then started thinking about what I could do to make my Ender work a bit better, and dropped $40 on Ali parts to build it a Stealthburner with a Bambu clone hotend. That got me into the Voron rabbit hole, though, and before actually getting parts, I started counting the extrusions in my apartment. To my surprise, it looked like between the Ender and an old out-of-tune Anycubic Predator delta printer a friend gave me, I would actually have enough extrusions to build a 300mm Voron V2. Plus, if I could figure out the config side, I should be able to use two mainboards I already had (likely Creality V4.2.7 and Creality V4.2.2, or possibly the V4.2.7 and the Trigorilla one from the Delta), to run 7 stepper motors I already had, and a hotend I already had, making the Voron's BOM start looking a lot more manageable!

I then spent a few days inspecting the build manual to understand what all the parts were used for, and then shopping around on AliExpress for, well, the cheapest parts I could find. After a few targeted "cheapening" mods, I was sitting at a cart of just $122 CAD for everything I'd need, which seemed cheap enough for me to take the plunge!

In poking around Voron communities, though, I realized that the Stealthburner probably isn't the best setup for the PLA I usually print, and decided I'd instead try the A4T design, since it seemed modern, mostly matched the hardware I had, and had a filament cutter design I trusted (A MMU is in the cards for the future). That'll be another $10 Ali order, though.

So, those “cheapening” mods I mentioned include the following:
-Printed 80T Z gears. I know they’re not recommended, but they were good enough for early V2 official releases, so hopefully they’re good enough for my inexacting standards?
-6mm Z belts. Apparently the 9mm ones were considered optional when they were introduced, and this will let me reuse ones I have
-Bltouch for bed leveling. I’ve always been happy with mine, and I already own them
-MGN9 linear rail for the X axis. If it was good enough for the V2.2 official release, hopefully it’s good enough for me, and saves a few bucks over the MGN12!
-Reusing the Delta printer’s build plate, which is, of course, circular, but which does almost encompass a 300mm square.
-This is the big one: 8mm linear rods for the Z axis. Linear rails are expensive, and at least in my reckoning, didn’t seem all that necessary for the slow-moving Z axis. Plus, I already had a stock of rods and bearings from an old RepRap i3, so it would be free! This is also the most experimental mod, since I had to model everything myself. I’m a little worried about how far the rods had to be from the belts and the original mounting of the rails, and I’m afraid that that will confuse the leveling algorithm, but the cost of rails would probably have prevented the build in the first place, so we’ll hope for the best.

Progress:
So, other than research, parts orders, and 3D modeling, I’ve made a little concrete progress.
The first order of business was to cut these weird 1000mm extrusions that my old Delta printer had into relatively standard 1x1 extrusions. That wasn’t easy at all, but between some 3D printed jigs for an angle grinder, aggressive use of a Sawzall, a bench vise, and complete disregard for throwing aluminum dust into every nook and cranny of my apartment’s bedroom, I got it done! Some of the cuts are very messy, but I think it’ll be fine with strategic placement of them. Hopefully they’re still straight enough.

The other big job that I’ve now completed is building an enclosure and ventilation system for the Ender 3 to actually print ABS parts for the Voron. This consists of a basic frame made out of the extrusions that will hopefully compose the Voron eventually, a bunch of cardboard and packing tape, that i3’s frame for a strong front opening, a Milwaukee battery work light to let me see what’s going on through the front window, and a ventilation system made of a bunch of Lego Technic, packing tape, and a random little AC fan I had lying around. The first ABS part is on the printer as I type this, and seems to be looking good so far!

Anyways, this definitely won’t be the quality printer a Voron is, but that’s why it’s just a “Pooron,” and hopefully it’s still a good, cheap, upgrade over an Ender 3, with more upward room for future upgrades! Thanks for reading

^Messily cut extrusions

What those extrusions looked like before cutting:

[broken talon]

Looking forward to how it turns out!

It’s been a good while since I’ve seen your ender in person. Will be neat to see what it becomes!

[broken talon]

How much of the extrusions were removed? And only 2 sides of the 1x1 are usable ?

[weary shuttle]

Yeah, only two sides have the profile remaining to slot things into. This is what a nicer cut one looks like:

[broken talon]

Oh those look really good, nice job

[broken talon]

I’m guessing 2 is enough, tho I mean if you really need something you could print a block and glue it into place and a heated insert

[weary shuttle]

Well, that one's not bad, but some of them are... Like this one:

[weary shuttle]

I think it should be; I can always drill a hole and tap threads if I need to

[broken talon]

Mmm yea not the best but oh well, it works right

[weary shuttle]

I also cut all three of those extrusions to make six 1000mm 1x1s, and I only strictly need four of them, so I can be a little picky and only choose the best ones

[broken talon]

That’s nice

Handy if you made a mistake with one some how

[weary shuttle]

Yeah

And I can be picky on a half-by-half basis, since I'll be cutting the meter-long ones into roughly half

[weary shuttle]

I haven't made much progress; I've mostly been printing a big pile of parts and waiting for orders to arrive, but I think the printing phase should be done this weekend, after which I should be able to start assembly in earnest!
One thing I did was rip down the other two 425 2040 extrusions from my Delta printer into four 425mm 2020 extrusions, more or less, because I changed my plan for the frame. Now I'm going to be using factory-cut 425mm extrusions for the top and bottom squares of the frame, and then ~500mm cuts of my long weird extrusions for the edges. I think using factory length cuts will help me get a squarer printer on those extrusions, and the longer extrusions for will help the printer get closer to actually being a cube. I think the theoretical volume with this setup is 305x305x290 or something, which beats the 300x300x220 that I think I was working with before.
So, out came the grinders and jig again, and then out came the dustpan to clean up my bedroom again!

I also got my A4T printhead printed, with a bit of a custom graphic on it:

Then tonight I got 3/4 of the Z drive shaft assemblies put together, but since I didn't want to buy 5mm rod, I ended up cutting down four spare/double screwdrivers I had lying around! In a way that feels like a waste, but they were handy, and I didn't need them.

So, then I got these put together! The bearings for them turned out to be the same size as the ones in V-slot bearings for Ender 3s, so I cut the plastic off some of my spares and used the internal bearings for this

As mentioned, I'm using the outdated plastic 80T gears for the Z drive, which is part of the budget approach to the build, but which hopefully won't bite me too bad later

[verbal tree]

Hey, does that CAD mod use 4 linear rods and 4 linear rails together, or just one setup?

[weary shuttle]

Just the rods; I just didn't bother to hide the rails from the stock CAD file

[robust yacht]

Cue the made by layers gif where he tightens screws with a power tool and crunches the motor assemblies

[weary shuttle]

Heh, hopefully not! This power screwdriver doesn't impact, and I had it on the lowest clutch setting, so it was slipping the clutch by the time it was tight. I do wish it had lower clutch settings, though!

[robust yacht]

If I had to use something like that I would screw the bolts 90% in and then tighten by hand, so I don't end up overtorquing them

For unscrewing stuff, power tools are fine for the most part

[autumn violet]

Good luck with this, "think" you are in Canada, which is unlucky as I found a cheapo plasce for 2020 profile in the UK, which match Misumi's

I'm currently looking at converting my old Ender5 Pro in to a 2.4 ish printer

[robust yacht]

Also trick for the heatset inserts, push one in, then push the entire flat side on some flat metal. You will end up with perfectly sinked in heatsets and no excess molten plastic on the contour like you have.
Also I would personally take the time to clean up any remaining material with a hobby knife, printer will probably use these parts for hundreds of hours so better have them pretty

[weary shuttle]

You're right, that definitely would be better practice!
That being said, is there a range of tightness where it wouldn't break anything immediately, but would cause damage eventually? What I'm doing now doesn't seem to have short-term drawbacks, since nothing has broken, but maybe there are long-term problems I'm not aware of

[weary shuttle]

Yep, I am in Canada! I'm not too familiar with different extrusion styles, but at least the ones I'm using for everything but the vertical ones have a flat profile, rather than a V-slot one. I think that's closer to what's recommended?

[weary shuttle]

Sounds fun!

[weary shuttle]

Thanks for the tip!

[weary shuttle]

I had some time this evening, and got all the extrusions cut to length and drilled for blind corners. I also temporarily assembled part of the frame to come up with a plan to mount the very much non-standard bed I'm going to be using!

I should be able to mount it with just one extra transverse extrusion on the rear, and some bolts directly from the front extrusion with a spacer

Next step will be shooting some paint at the exposed aluminum to clean the look up a bit, but that's a little tricky living in an apartment without a real garage or even yard. Probably I'll do it at the college parking lot at lunch tomorrow!

[weary shuttle]

Today was a productive day! I got the extrusions shot with some quick paint, and then assembled the frame, which was a bit more involved due to the need to integrate my linear-rod setup for the Z axis. After that I got the Z drives installed, and then started assembling the Z idlers.

However, that's when the inevitable happened...
I found I had missed printing two of the green parts for the idlers:

And that's a bit of a problem, since I've already disassembled the enclosure I was using with the Ender 3 (since it was made of the same extrusions as the Voron), and the Ender 3 itself has just had its stepper motors removed, and then had the pulleys removed from the X and Y motors

Luckily I do have a couple spare 20T gears with grub screws, and enough steppers lying around to rebuild the Ender, but it'll then just be a matter of trying to get it to print at least temporary parts. PLA would print fine, except that I ripped out the part fan/duct after it was warping and getting caught in hot ABS prints. ABS would be ideal, but I'm not sure if I'll have any success without my enclosure. Maybe I'll just have to attempt a PLA print tomorrow with an external fan blasting the bed, and slow print speeds?

[robust yacht]

have you done abs shrinkage compensation before printing your parts? easiest thing is checking if the a4t can fit the pc fans without pushing them hard. I print my abs at 99.45% shrinkage and that .55% really made a difference even on small parts like the a4t cowl

[weary shuttle]

No, I didn't. So far things seem to be working, but unfortunately the 2510 fan for the A4T is likely to be the very last part I receive for the project (I ordered one on Ali, and then it self-canceled. Then I ordered another, and I just noticed today that it self-canceled too)

I could give it a try with one of the blower fans, though!

[robust yacht]

that's the pc fan I was talking about 😛 (part cooling)

a4t is very picky about the blower fans, if you need to push them hard-ish then you would need to reprint it with proper shrinkage. Telling you now since I don't see many printed pieces, but as soon as you print something bigger like exhaust filter/skirts/etc. you will get into issues.
I had to reprint my exhaust filter cover, the hdmi screen mount, a4t cowl,plus other things while assembling my 2.4 250, so better do it now than later (teachingtech has a super simple calibration piece on printables which I used, 10 minutes and you are done)

last year I also printed all pieces for an ercf v2 with buffers and let me tell you assembling it was not nice at all for the same reason, I have a bunch of cracked parts there

[weary shuttle]

Ok, that's appreciated! I guess if I had known it was that easy I probably would have done it earlier... Now that I've got the enclosure taken apart I'm not sure I can print ABS well at all, so it might be too late to properly calibrate it. Hopefully I can just print parts decent enough to bootstrap into a working Voron, and then reprint anything necessary with proper calibration!
I guess the A4T cowl is probably the only large print I've already printed, so hopefully I can make it work

[robust yacht]

Both linear bearing slots are cracked since I had to push them with a vise, chef kiss (if the chef was on crack)

[robust yacht]

heh, usually abs shrinks by about 0.5%, so even a generic value like 99.5% would be beneficial. Or ask in #slicers_and_print_help for better suggestions

as I heard often, printing parts for a voron to then reprint all parts and reassemble it is not something you will like, better do it now. Of course 90% of the parts are fine with a bit of shrinkage issues, won't care if a z idler is .5% off if the idler is in there and turns fine

[weary shuttle]

Yeah, that definitely doesn't sound fun! Hopefully I don't have to do much of that. These Z idlers might not be ideal, so I might need to redo those, and then we'll see about the A4T shroud

[weary shuttle]

All right, time for today's update!
When I got home, I threw some random stepper motors from the Delta on the Ender, but they weren't working properly. Random motion back and forth when homing, and weird noises. Maybe they're wired up differently? I'll need to figure that out for later, but for the time being I just ripped the original Ender ones out of the Voron and got the Ender running again. It seems to be printing ABS just fine without an enclosure, so that's good! I got the two extra Z idlers printed, but unfortunately during some other work, I broke these two linear rod mounts, since they were unreasonably tight! I'm now reprinting those with larger tolerances

While parts were printing, I got back to assembly, getting the circular bed mounted, Z idlers installed, and most of the gantry put together:

Since most of my machine screws are salvaged from other printers, that assembly meant chopping a lot of screws to length with the trusty angle grinder!

I also took the opportunity to clean the linear rails with isopropyl alcohol, and then greased them with some leftover grease from packing the wheel bearings on my car, which conveniently appears to be the recommended type of grease!

Hopefully I can get primary assembly finished up in the next few days, but I'm still waiting on some parts for the toolhead, and I expect wiring and Klipper configuration to take a while

Also, while working with the Ender today, I noticed that the X carriage is extremely loose, to the point where I'm not sure how it had been working! I also expect these to be its last prints, though, so when a fix didn't immediately present itself, I figured I'd just roll with it, and it still seems to be printing just fine, strangely

[robust yacht]

check if you just need to tighten the eccentric nut on the back of the carriage 🙂

also free non planar 3d printing

[weary shuttle]

Yeah, I have adjusted it before, so I took a look at it yesterday. The nut there was loose, and the wheel was looking pretty worn, so I swapped the wheel, tightened the nut, and tried tightening the eccentric, but it didn't seem to be responding as I expected. I'm sure I could have figured it out with half an hour of work, but it was still printing, and at the time I thought I only needed one more print out of it before I retired it!

[weary shuttle]

Honestly! This morning I was printing a lot of really small parts, and I was kind of glad to see the nozzle just bump over any small surface irregularities on the parts, rather than catching on them and knocking them off the plate!
'Course, it may have only had those irregularities because of the looseness, but still...

[robust yacht]

if we don't question it it's not a fault

[weary shuttle]

I guess not!

I do have a question, though:
Has stepper motor tech improved notably in the past ~8 years?
I'm just trying to decide where I allocate different stepper motors in the build.
I've got five old NEMA 17s from an old 12V RepRap i3 build I bought years ago, and they're some of the long, and presumably torquey ones. My understanding is that NEMA steppers don't really care about voltage, so even if those were on an old 12V system, they should be fine on my 24V one?
Assuming they work in theory, my question is whether I should use those beefy but old motors for my Z drive, or whether I should use a mixed bag of random, and generally more compact (maybe less torquey) more modern ones from the Ender and Delta for the Z drives. Which would have more torque? Large and old, or compact and less old? How important is it for those motors to match?

[robust yacht]

No idea tbh, but I would make sure to always the same motor for an axis, no mismatched Z drives

Also bigger motor = more torque but also more weight to spin around, so less accelerations

[weary shuttle]

Ok, maybe I'll give those old motors a try for that then. At least they're easy to change if I decide against it!

[weary shuttle]

Ok, yeah. Shouldn't be a big deal on the Z axis

[robust yacht]

I'd say go with what you have and swap them if you need to, no need to purchase stuff it what you have could work

Also goes against the pooron philosophy

[weary shuttle]

I appreciate the respect for the philosophy!

Anyways, I just got home and tried wiring up some assorted stepper motors to the Ender 3 for testing, and was able to confirm that those old ones from the 12V system work, as well as the Delta printer ones. They've all just got two pins reversed compared to the Creality wiring, which is why the Delta ones weren't immediately working yesterday.
Anyways, it's good to confirm that they all work! It doesn't confirm that they're actually quality motors, but we'll figure that out later I guess

Adding up my stepper collection and moving them around in my head, I think I can actually just leave all four of the Ender's steppers where they are, which means all I really need to do is revert to a basic single-geared bowden setup, swap the original non-silent Creality board back into it, and rig up some cooling with my spare 5015 blower fan, revert to Marlin, and the Ender actually gets to live on in essentially its present form! It'll be a worse printer than it has been, but I am rather attached to it, and everyone needs at least one backup printer, right?

[weary shuttle]

So, I installed the new, hopefully final motors for the Z drives, as well as some newly printed parts for the rear Z rods. Then I got to work and finished screwing the gantry together!
Actually putting the gantry on the printer was a bit of a challenge, given my very non-standard Z rod setup, so I ended up having to remove the four top extrusions to get it installed. After replacing those and tightening up the Z rod mounts, it seems all right!
It is pretty tricky to raise and lower the gantry, though. If it's not perfectly level, it binds up, so I hope that won't be a problem once I have synchronized motors running it...

So, hopefully tomorrow I can get the whole belt situation figured out, and maybe start on wiring!

[weary shuttle]

I haven't had as much time to work on this as I'd like, but I think progress has been made! I've got all the belts installed, though not necessarily properly tensioned yet. I've also got the Z carriage with BLtouch installed

Then I started thinking about how I was going to mount electronics, and eventually decided the best next move was to cut down the roughly triangular steel plate from my old Delta printer to cover most of the electronics bay (I'll print parts later to fill in the remaining gaps). That gave me a bunch of nice built-in threaded posts to attach electronics to.
So, there's a lot of stuff stuck down there now!
-800W 24V power supply from the Delta, to run most of the printer functions
-Trigorilla main board from the Delta, to run the hotbed and Z motors, and whatever else is convenient
-Creality V2.4.7 main board from the Ender, to run the extruder and XY motors, plus whatever else is convenient
-Relay setup from the Delta to run the hotbed
-Ramps 1.4 main board from the RepRap i3, to potentially run ~4 more stepper motors for a custom MMU I'm hoping to build. Also to give it a real classic RepRap vibe
-12V power supply from the RepRap i3, to run the Ramps 1.4 main board. Yeah it's probably unnecessarily bulky, and I could probably get it running off the main PSU, but it doesn't cost me anything to throw it in there, and I've got the space
-Pi 3B, to run Klipper and connect all the main boards

I also threw on some panels from the sides of that Delta printer on the sides. They don't look quite as cool as printed skirts, but they fit perfectly, have a built-in mount for a power switch, and give me room to mount the one PSU to the bottom of the extrusion. I'll plan on printing a skirt for the front, and using these metal ones on the sides. I've got a messier metal one I could throw on the back, but I also might just leave it empty, since I never really see it anyways

[weary shuttle]

I spent the afternoon today wiring, and I think I made good progress! All the main boards have power, there's USBs from the Pi to the main boards, there's inputs to the PSUs, all the motion system steppers are wired up, and the XY endstops and BLtouch are installed. I'm waiting on some parts to build the toolhead, so I can't finish the wiring quite yet. I'll also figure out gantry wire management at that point, since it's far from acceptable at this point!

I think I have enough wired up now that I can start figuring out the Klipper config, though, which will be a challenge of its own

I'm already going to be running two AC cords to the printer for the two PSUs, so I didn't want to run a third one just to power the Pi.
In the end I dug up an old car cigarette lighter USB adapter, pulled it out of its shell, wired it up to the 12V PSU, and ran a USB from it to the Pi. I'm not sure if it'll meet its power requirements, but it's enough to let it power on at least!

Like I said, the wire management on the top end is pretty nonexistent:

And as I understand the rules, any project involving electricity requires me to state my local AC voltage? I'm on 120V

[robust yacht]

where have you read this?

[weary shuttle]

In the Build Log Ground Rules section, it says: "Any project involving electricity must be shared with your countries standard. Please keep it safe and be receptive towards suggestions concerning safety."
I wasn't really sure what was meant by that, but figured I'd be safe and mention it

[robust yacht]

I think it means that your project should follow your country's safety standards

[weary shuttle]

I had quite a busy day, and didn't really have time to work on stuff.
However, my next parts order arrived, so I was able to take a few minutes to install the magnetic sticker and PEI build plate that I'll be using!
Yes, that's a square build plate on a round heated bed, for, uh, peak jankiness

Doesn't look great, but will probably enable me to print (at least some materials that don't need too much heating) on the overhanging corners, and should be a generally better build surface than the textured glass (?) I was working with before

I've never actually tried a PEI plate before, so I'm kind of excited to see how well it works!

[weary shuttle]

I've been very busy this week, but I managed to scrounge up some time to write up a basic test config file for the printer, and actually got it moving under its own power for the first time!

I had a lot of issues with the config at first, but I worked through enough of them to test the motion system, and I'll work through more later. The main issue I had was caused by my being too clever for my own good!
I had noticed that my Ender 3 steppers were wired with two pins flipped compared to the Anycubic Predator ones, and so knowing that my XY motors were going to be from the Predator, while their board was from the Ender, I figured I'd need to flip the wiring to make them work, so I cut and resoldered two of the wires in each one. However, what I didn't think about was the fact that while the motors had their pins flipped, the wiring in the Predator presumably had the flip built-in, and the wires I was using, and had cut and flipped, were from the Predator... So I had to go back and desolder and flip those wires back to the way they were in the first place before...
Anyways, that was an easy enough fix, and I'm very excited to see it actually moving! It's especially a relief to see that my custom Z axis doesn't bind up

[weary shuttle]

Yesterday I got the full kinematic config set up and working, which was great to see!
After that I started assembling the A4T and Wristwatch extruder, but unfortunately, I had to remove the stainless steel drive gear from its shaft from my BMG extruder, which required pressing it out with a bench vise. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that the part under the plastic gear was larger and pressed the stainless gear out that way, causing it to crack

I got another one ordered last night, but it does push back project completion to ~2 weeks from now. 🙁
I was still waiting on the 2510 fan to arrive in about a week, but it's disappointing to push the timetable down the road yet again

I may end up installing a lousy Ender 3 Bowden extruder temporarily, just to start testing prints

[weary shuttle]

Whelp, I had some time tonight, so I got most of the toolhead and extruder assembled! The only real job I can still do before the rest of my parts come is cutting some 1/8" drill bits to length to be rods for the filament cutter, and I'm thinking would be socially unacceptable to wake up my apartment-mates with late-night angle grinder action!

[weary shuttle]

I got the toolhead put together (and the filament cutter working) yesterday. It was a lot harder than I expected to get the cutter to spring back into position without binding, but after a lot of filing and WD-40, it seems to be moving reliably. I then spent the afternoon slinging solder at the toolhead wiring, and got everything wired up that I can (which is everything except the 2510 fan I'm waiting on).

I've got some weird wire choices. Most of it is reused from other printers, but the wire for the two filament sensor microswitches and the X endstop is a reused old USB cable from an old mouse I tore apart for the microswitches (two internal wires for the endstop, one internal ground shared between the two filament sensors, and two internal wires for the other sides of the filament sensors)
I'm currently in an aircraft maintenance program at college, doing a year of avionics. We build a lot of wiring harnesses in class, and we then throw out a lot of wiring harnesses, which I've been salvaging. This might be the first-ever BLtouch wired up with aviation-grade triple-shielded and double-shielded wire!

I've currently just got the toolhead and extruder screwed onto the carriage in random ways, just to keep them from dangling from wires

I also temporarily threw on this lousy extruder, which will hopefully let me test some prints in the interval between getting the 2510 fan, and getting the replacement extruder gear

[weary shuttle]

I then spent a while getting this old Reprap Discount Smartcontroller LCD set up, on the similarly old Ramps 1.4 board. It took a while to find the proper pin assignments for it in Klipper, but I finally got it all working! I don't think I'll use it much, but it's handy to have as a status indicator, and maybe occasionally will be useful if the computer is off. I'll have to figure out what I want to do for a mount for it. I haven't found any designs for this particular screen for a Voron, so I guess I can either work in my old Prusa i3 one, or design one of my own

[rapid rampart]

I'm offended.

[weary shuttle]

That may be an appropriate response...

Anyways, I got my hotend fan tonight, so I was able to get the hotend put together and filament flowing for the first time! I'm using that horrible extruder with a horrible Bowden tube, until I get my replacement BMG gears

Didn't have a long enough Bowden, so I have two attached end-to-end with a couple fittings screwed into a nut:

With that, it is now printing!

First print looked like this:

After toning down acceleration and speed (stock Orca profile was probably ambitious for a machine with zero tuning), I got a cube to print this far before it stopped extruding:

A third attempt made it this far:

I'm not exactly sure what the root problem is, but I think odds are quite good it has something to do with the highly janky extruder setup, so I won't worry too much about it unless it persists after getting the proper extruder set up next week

Anyways, it's really exciting to see it actually moving and printing for the first time!

[rich crater]

how's it going?

[weary shuttle]

I guess I haven't made an update for a while! I got the replacement extruder gear on Monday, installed it, and got printing again. I had some weird semi-layer shift defects on my next test cube, but I hadn't done any real tuning yet, so I didn't worry about it.
I then decided to move on to belt tensioning, which seemed harder than I expected to get the right frequency. However, I then noticed this:

Both XY belts had stretched sections, and obviously wouldn't work. I guess that's what I get for buying a $6 belt off Ali instead of going for the name-brand Gates ones that they warned me were important!

So, now I'm waiting on proper Gates belts to arrive before the tuning process can continue!

[weary shuttle]

Well, the proper belt has arrived! Unfortunately I'm super busy this week, so I'm not sure when I'll be able to install it.

[weary shuttle]

Never mind; as a wise man once said, "Any lack of time can be resolved by staying up later," so I got the new belts routed now

I'll save actually tensioning them for later, though. Another wise man would advise against doing critical tasks while sleepy, so I'll be patient

[velvet garnet]

amazing project!

[weary shuttle]

Thanks!

I got the belts tensioned and everything put back together, so it's printing now!

Hopefully I can get tuning sorted soon, and get it to actually start printing itself parts soon, so I can keep the project moving

[weary shuttle]

This is definitely my best test cube yet! There's still tuning to do, but it's a successful baseline:

[weary shuttle]

I spent the weekend tuning, and pretty well got it sorted!
Then I noticed that one of my XY idlers broke, which was causing the belt to slide over the lip of the pulley. Unfortunately I'm not set up to print ABS well at the moment (got to get an enclosure together), but for now I was able to come up with a shockingly functional hack job to keep it printing: A zip tie around the long extending part of the bolt that holds the pulley on, and then around the linear rod. It requires the zip tie to slide up and down on the rod, but it doesn't seem to have had any issues with that!

Unfortunately, I'm not sure how much of my tuning was done with that broken, if any. Prints seem decent at the moment, though, and I'm not too much of a perfectionist on printer tuning, so hopefully I'll be ok

Now that it's printing acceptably, I've been able to use it to print itself some parts! I started with some large triangular parts to fill in the front corners of the bottom panel (I had a cut steel part from the Delta printer on there before, but it didn't fill the whole space). I also printed the front skirt, and a LCD mount that I modified from the files of an old Prusa design that used this LCD:

I did have one question, though. Whenever I increase speeds above about 250 mm/s, I get these obnoxious squeaking noises on fast moves. What would that be a sign of? I have greased the rails. Is it just a byproduct of my using the cheapest random rails I could find on AliExpress? It's not a big deal, and I don't mind keeping speeds below that limit, but if there was an easy way to fix it it would be great!

[rich crater]

Love your work!

[autumn violet]

It sounds a bit like bearing vibration, if you are setup and do a vibration profile, you may be able to find it

You could ask on Rescue Ravens and see if anyone close could whip you a pair of idlers, I have some but am in UK

[weary shuttle]

Thanks!

[weary shuttle]

Ok, thanks! That sounds cheaper to fix than linear rails, at least!
I assume you need an accelerometer to do a vibration profile? I'm not set up with one of those.
I do have spare idlers left after the build, so I could try swapping some of them out. (Though they're probably of the same budget quality as the ones on there).
I'll have to try doing some fast diagonal moves to see if I can isolate which belt the noise is coming from--that seems like it would be a quick way to determine whether it's belt/pulley or linear rail

[autumn violet]

You can get an ADSL345 for pennies, well maybe a couple of quid

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007557329503.html?spm=a2g0o.productlist.main.5.4b694bff3P8vOc&algo_pvid=c9032957-d44e-4d31-9c86-b5b3c51c226f&algo_exp_id=c9032957-d44e-4d31-9c86-b5b3c51c226f-4&pdp_ext_f={"order"%3A"36"%2C"eval"%3A"1"%2C"fromPage"%3A"search"}&pdp_npi=6%40dis!GBP!5.41!1.73!!!49.22!15.75!%40210390c217642618049222827e3ecc!12000041283752848!sea!UK!846895469!X!1!0!n_tag%3A-29919%3Bd%3A1cca7c8a%3Bm03_new_user%3A-29895&curPageLogUid=nvYbuprmrRpG&utparam-url=scene%3Asearch|query_from%3A|x_object_id%3A1005007557329503|_p_origin_prod%3A

[weary shuttle]

Nice! Or maybe as low as 247 pennies here:

[autumn violet]

If your rails are greased I doubt it is them, may be wrong but never heard a rail do that

[weary shuttle]

Probably worth getting one the next time I make an Ali order, then!

[weary shuttle]

Glad to hear it! That's not a part I want to replace

[autumn violet]

I did but then all my heads have one built in so its sits here looking sad and unused

[weary shuttle]

Do you think whatever's causing that noise might also be behind the layer shift I'm dealing with?

[weary shuttle]

Hmm, fast diagonal accelerations cause that noise, regardless of which motor I'm using for it. I guess that implies that the sound is either linear rails, or just bearing problems in both belt paths

[velvet garnet]

just make sure you connect them with SPI interface, not i2C.

[weary shuttle]

Boy, it's been a long time since I updated this thread! I'll have some progress to show soon, but as it turns out, the solution to that noise I was dealing with was increasing stepper current!

[weary shuttle]

So, the most obvious thing I've done to the printer is to "enclose" it, though, as usual, in cheapskate fashion! I stopped short of a pure cardboard solution, and instead modified Honeycomb Storage Wall panels to match the size of the printer. After printing and assembling those, I simply applied overlapping runs of packing tape, to provide an air barrier and transparency on the cheap!

It certainly won't be insulating the way a proper chamber could, but I imagine it'll be good enough to print ABS without too much hassle. What it does have, though, is a great degree of modularity for storage on the printer itself! I've already printed honeycomb-compatible spool holders for the top (currently removed for use at this desk), and I plan on printing a fair bit more in the way of tool holders, and perhaps a storage solution to hang the removable doors when not in use (which will be most of the time, since I usually print PLA)

I also added a simple switch to my LCD panel to allow for turning it off without the whole printer, by breaking and fixing a couple pins of the ribbon cable going to it. It seems to require a restart of the printer to get it working again after being turned off, but it allows me to have the LCD available, without having to deal with its surprisingly bright light while I sleep

Finally, I've been working on adding a custom MMU, patterned after the Medusa project developed by Irbis3D (of Duender fame). It's got four steppers (controlled from my Ramps 1.4 MCU), with independent extruders hooked up to a 4-into-1 splitter (there's support for a fifth channel, but I'm not using it currently)

This splitter has microswitches in it for filament detection, and then runs the filament through a long bowden up to the toolhead, where the primary direct-drive extruder will sync up with the auxiliary extruder to run the print

I also have the filament cutter that was built in to the toolhead to facilitate filament changes

Anyways, while the hardware for the MMU is mostly complete (I'll be switching at least two of the aux steppers to BMG extruders after running into issues), the software is just beginning!

I've done some digging around the macros from the project I'm emulating, and I think I know how to get it where I need it to be, but I expect it to be pretty finicky

[twin bone]

could possibly be stealthchop too if thats on

[weary shuttle]

I have those motors running on a Creality V4.2.7 board, which unfortunately means that I don't have any software control over the drivers (as far as I can tell), with only a potentiometer to adjust current with. I'm not sure if something like stealthchop would be on by default or not, but I'm not convinced I could change it on this main board.
Luckily it's working, which is the main thing!