There aren't many direct drive delta printers are there? Its more of a mod people do after owning one.
I need to get an E3D hotend to see what all the hype is about, although I might have a special delivery coming from Printrbot soon????? More on that later
Yup, I will be relying on the kindness of youtube geeks to help me out!
I don't think stock will start shipping until February though.
Gives me chance to save up a little longer after spending some of the printer budget on a new monitor!
Yup, I will be relying on the kindness of youtube geeks to help me out!
I don't think stock will start shipping until February though.
Gives me chance to save up a little longer after spending some of the printer budget on a new monitor!
I've just finished treating my Ultimaker 2 to some TLC..
- New bowden tube (Blagged from medical suppliers...)
- New Olsson Block Hot end
- New thermal coupling (PTFE)
- Printed a new Feeder design that is vastly better than the stock one
- New temperature sensor
- Just messing with different Fan ducts for cooling the print
I've ordered a larger capacity heating element for the head as better cooling = better print quality but my standard 25W element is not man enough to keep the head hot with max cooling! And I've got some Kapton tape coming tomorrow so I can try a few more fan duct designs that work better with the larger hot end.
Just printed some tiny-weeny snowmen for the kids to see if it's all 'working' and so far so good:
I've just finished treating my Ultimaker 2 to some TLC..
- New bowden tube (Blagged from medical suppliers...)
- New Olsson Block Hot end
- New thermal coupling (PTFE)
- Printed a new Feeder design that is vastly better than the stock one
- New temperature sensor
- Just messing with different Fan ducts for cooling the print
I've ordered a larger capacity heating element for the head as better cooling = better print quality but my standard 25W element is not man enough to keep the head hot with max cooling! And I've got some Kapton tape coming tomorrow so I can try a few more fan duct designs that work better with the larger hot end.
Just printed some tiny-weeny snowmen for the kids to see if it's all 'working' and so far so good:
Nice one Demon. Some pics when finished would be nice.
I've decided to only change my left hand side hot end to E3D so I can keep the auto bed levelling.
I've also got to come up with a design to upgrade my extruder
I've had my Ultimaker 2 for just over a year (October 2014) where I bought it second-hand from a guy that was just struggling to use it. I only bought it to do a few small projects (In-car wireless charging dock was the initial reason) and it was definitely just something cool to tinker with as an engineer.
I found one second hand on the Ultimaker forums, some guy had bought one and just couldn't seem to get it working well and needed the cash, so I snapped it up!
Here it is in its current guise:
The list of mods I have made are
- Bearing spool holder - Why they think a plain bit of plastic is suitable for holding a spool I don't know, it grates and wobbles as the feeder pulls the filament off! Luckily their are plenty of designs on youmagine/thingiverse that address this!
- Filament guide - the orginal one is pathetic, just a tiny fixed slotted affair that just doesn't work, the filament just pops off every few prints and potentially causes a feeding nightmare. I designed one myself that is fully enclosed and rotates
- Loose Filament Holder - I bought some faberdashery loose filament and needed something that would make feeding this a bit easier, and still fit on the back of the printer, I tried some designs on thingiverse, but they where not deep enough! so I designed my own:
- IP Camera Mount - Essential if you want to keep an eye on things! I wanted to be able to record and really get a good look at the print underway, so decided to design a front mounted bracket that would fit the mount supplied with the Foscam.
THen things ran smoothly for a while, and designing / printing stuff was great fun!
e.g. two small items:
-Raspberry Pi Case
- Mobile Phone tripod mount
But then a couple of months ago I started having issues, namely under extrusion and blocked nozzles! I tried so many different things, cleaning the nozzle (using the atomic method) always left a clean nozzle I could see through, and I couldn't see any mechanical wear at all! but prints kept failing halfway through! After 20 failed prints, I gave up for a few weeks!
In the end I noted that it failed during periods of retraction, which led me to strip the head down for the umpteenth time, and then I noticed the PTFE Coupler that acts as a heat break between filament and hotend was internally bowed meaning filament could expand and then increase friction moving through the rest of the coupler!.. An £18 part had been slowly degrading and caused all these issues.. (Its a consumable part)
So renewed, I decided to treat the printer to a birthday, and ordered a hotend kit from Ultimaker (Comes with brass housing, nozzle, temperature sensor, PTFE coupler etc), but also noticed that the new Olsson block (allows E3D Nozzles to be used and can be instantly changed) was being shipped with new Ultimaker printers, so I thought I'd order one of those too! In total around £100 on new parts, but I now have lots of spares!
Just replacing the coupler instantly fixed my extrusion issues! but that left me looking at the whole printer and decided to start improving things..
- New feeder - There is a popular design on youmagine that gets great reviews and uses most of internals of the standard feeder, so printed one out, and I have to say it's much better, easier to load/unload an crucially heavy retraction never causes extrusion issues.
- Olsson Block / Fan Ducts - the Olsson block is so simple yet a great improvement, it uses the original heater/temp sensor, and mounts to the hot end block with ease (And is now supplied by Ultimaker on new printers as an in the box upgrade). The issue is the standard fan ducts (which are for a dual extruder anyway) are too high and out the way, so people are trialling new ducts, which I am doing right now:
Next step (already ordered) is a 35W heater to replace the 25W standard heater, and some more fan duct trials, but already it's printing better than ever and is a reliable joy to use again!
I'm just doing the christmas stuff with the kids, printing cookie cutters, ornaments, robots etc.. My kids now love getting involved, which I encourage of course!
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