Hey everyone, first time poster here but I’ve been reading most of the posts in the group for the last year or so. I’ve designed a printer in Solidworks that is very much based on Eustathios V1 and Herculien, with a couple of twists.
The goals I have with this printer is to make it as cheap as possible on parts not essential for achieving the highest possible quality prints (within reason), so I’m constructing the frame out of some square steel tubing I found and some wood. Another goal is to make everything as neat as possible, hiding everything possible (wires, belts, motors, etc). That’s where the current working name came from: Houdini.
I had the idea to do a Eustathios V1 style XY gantry and trying to hide the vertical drive belts within the square steel tubes. The only unusual thing I have to do is having to drill out a couple of 20T GT2 pulleys to make the ID=10mm (according to my Solidworks testing, this should be okay).
One modification made is a little cut to the top of the Z gantry plate to allow it to go a little higher as Walter’s mini space invaders carriage has the tip of the nozzle at about 2 cm higher than the ones on Eric’s dual carriage.
One way of minimizing cost and problems was making as many things required in standard sizes that are readily available. This includes making the V-Slot extrusions of length 500mm and using TR8X8 leads screws of length 500mm.
I have access to a local fablab that has an X-Carve CNC Mill and a drill press, among other things. I’ll try to use these things as much as possible to make sure everything is cut and drilled to specs.
The deciding factor in XY size are four 10mm rods I pulled from some printers being thrown out at my office that have a length of 503mm. With my design I had to make some minor modifications to the heated bed. I will be using an E3D hotend, Voron Mobius2 extruder (money saving experiment to avoid buying a planetary stepper) and probably an Azteeg X5 GT controller.
I have added some screenshots of my design and some interesting parts I’ve mentioned above. I have yet to add all screws, end stops, controller, power plug, and a few small things. This design also makes it very easy to enclose it, I’ll probably do that some day.
I have some questions I was hoping you guys could help me with:
-
Why are 8 eccentric spacers in the V slot assembly in the BOM for Herculien? The Solidworks model has 4 aluminium spacers and 4 eccentric spacers
-
I have a bunch of Nema17 48mm (and smaller) steppers I pulled from the office printers. I am planning to use these for the X&Y drives. I was wondering if I should also use these for a dual stepper setup on Z or if I should spring for a 60mm high torque stepper for Z (considering the high shipping cost of the stepper from robotdigg)?
-
I will be printing the parts in PLA to start with as I have access to free printing in PLA. I have then planned on replacing these with PETG parts printed on this printer once completed. I have the bronze self aligning bushings and I have read some posts here about it being not so nice to remove these after installed. I saw a post about someone creating clamshell belt tighteners, I was wondering if you guys thought it would be feasible for me to design something similar for easy removal of my bushings from the PLA belt tighteners and carriage once I have printed the PETG parts?
-
I had the idea to make the 2020 cross beams for the heated bed (e.g.) 4mm shorter for a degree of freedom (pictured), what do you think?
-
Would there be any reason for not using nyloc nuts instead of standard nuts everywhere possible when securing parts you would expect that you wouldn’t be moving or adjusting much or at all after the initial dialing in (e.g. on my XY gantry bearing holders)? I’m just thinking about trying to prevent things needlessly coming loose over time. I do know that after removing nyloc nuts you can’t use them again, so I would have to replace them after switching out the PLA parts with PETG.
Thanks in advance, I really think this is a great community full of knowledge, it’s a damn shame G+ is being pulled down, hopefully there can be a migration to another platform, e.g. a new subreddit or something.
If you have any feedback, ideas, questions or anything, please fire away!