We have moved to Japan!

Good news, everyone! Schorsch is now living and working at OIST, Okinawa, Japan. Don’t worry about his wooden body, the Lab he’s in has a nice dry atmosphere and he shares it with a lot of far more expensive stuff. So far he’s doing a good job, but the fancy new place with ocean view has a steady cold breeze from the AC above so i will have to do something about that.

He survived the 14hrs+ in a plane with minor injuries on Z. Luckily the parts that broke were meant to break in case of failure and i am quite proud that there were no further problems due to the loose, rocking Z-axis. X and Y arrived fully working, even the lines haven’t jumped off any bearing.  Remember to fix EVERY part that can move when you put your Printer on an international trip!

 

Everything works fine!

It works so well…

Finally: SYXZ!

After four years of devolopement i finally decided how Schorschs Z-axis looks like. The old four-motor-overkill-but-underperforming-axis is gone and now there are some fine ballscrews, given to me by the great Timm Burkhardt, and polished silver-steel rods giving Schorsch 295mm of the straightest Z i can make.

Although the two ballscrews are 100% straight i decoupled them a bit from the tray to compensate any shifting that may come from my printed motor-ballscrew connector. Maybe i will change that but for now there is absolutely no reason.

(sorry for the blurry pictures, when there is time i will update them)

 

It’s an angry robot.

Despite working hinges (!) this little one became angry when the white ABS chose to warp intensivly on his chin. Look at it – i also would get mad with that chin. This one was printed in 0.15mm, 30mm/s. Another one @0.2mm, 24mm/s  is almost ready, but i don’t think it will get much better.
As you can see, one can still see X because it still is the old one. Btw. I decided to buy a new Z instead of building one by myself. It feels kind of cheaper that way. 🙂

accuracy…

Sometimes you just want to print something to see if the changes you made on your maschine made it better or worse. A few days ago i installed new step-sticks for X and Y, the ones with 1/32 microstepping. Although the stepps/mm doubled, my Ramps has no problems driving SXY with 400mm/s on rapid-moves. The sound is a bit smoother but there is still room for improvement…

The print on the picture above is this robot from thingiverse. It has moving arms, hands, legs and feet. The support you see is to print the arms with ~30° overhang. The gaps between the moving parts are ~0.33mm. I am not shure if it is a good idea to print it with ABS…

Not shure if this makes it to new Z…

Schorsch’s new Z-bearings will look kind of like X and Y. But in stead of the 8mm Rods X and Y use i want to use 10mm to reduce shaking. The BBs are 13mm in diameter because there is no need to make it as small as X and Y. Maybe i should support the rods… and redesign the shown part… and rethink all other related parts… meh.

Let’s see what 2016 brings!

12hrs are 10:52 now

After a few 2-3h prints Schorsch is printing an estimated 12h-job… (@ 30mm/s, Jerk 50mm/s)

This print took 10:52. Kisslicer said something about 11:35, as old Schorsch always took a little longer i am surprised that new Schorsch is a bit faster than Kisslicer thinks.

Speedtest

Ok, Schorsch can print @ 220 mm/s and up. But since even PLA quits at these speeds the last layers of this gear are printed at 40mm/s… The first and  the middle part of that gear were printed with 100 – 220 mm/s (first layer ~20mm/s) to see how it works. You can’t really call it ‘printing’ since straight ‘printing’- moves look like normal rapid moves. The result is fightening ugly. I don’t think it is a good idea to print at those speeds. But it’s nice to know that Schorsch could.

It’s done.

Dear world, i did it! I finally did it! I redesigned my printer. Today it printed it’s first things. Straight things, round things, 100% filled things. Now a case.

To be honest, i kept the old four-corners-four-motors-Z-axis… I just wanted to see new Schorsch printing! And how he does…

But of course i ran into some struggles: Broken wires stopped the heatbed, the temporary magnet for the X-endswitch damaged the switch causing Schorsch to grind madly in the corner and finally loosing the A-line. While dealing with that i figured out that it is a good idea to move the head free with my hands to feel if there is a problem with the lines. If it misses one bearing it is much harder to move – prints start normal but at some rapid move it will loose many steps – and makes you a nice piece of crab. When both lines are jumped off – well, i din’t know.

For today’s over-night-print i reduced Schorsch’s speed to 350mm/s @ 10000mm/s² printing @38mm/s. I noticed the motors lost steps when heated +50°C. Maybe i reduce the current a little. 500mm/s schouldn’t be a problem with only one Hotend.

Old Schorsch is now part of new Schorsch. New PSUs wait to replace the old chinese 1150W PSU on the right and the 15V for the heatbed. As you can see i am still stuck with 200x200mm²… enough to print its new Z.

btw. I removed the door of the nightstand because it was too loud.

Here’s new XY

That’s right! New Schorsch is a 60’s nightstand that will leave future archaeologists clueless. The final dimensions are 345 x 205mm². An idea with consequences that kept me awake too long yesterday was to place the Y-endstop at Ymax – only the bugfixed RC of the actual (dec 2015) marlin firmware can handle that with coreXY enabled. The other branches kept Y useless after hitting Ymax…

While researching that problem i found a lot of people using or building coreXY-based printers – yeah! Some of them even use fishing-line! Strike! Now i’ll wait for more old-furniture-printers…