Ontopic The 3D printing thread

Yup. The more I hear about the Ender3, the more I hate it - it suffers from the same "you gotta change out half the printer to make a printer that isn't a piece of shit" problem as every other shitty chinese printer. At least chinese printers have mostly stopped burning down people's houses...

I'll still second the Prusa MK2S kit recommendation. It's $599 but it's a well thought out, well made printer that will work well out of the box. Yeah it's a kit, but the instructions are very well written:

https://manual.prusa3d.com/c/Original_Prusa_i3_MK2S_kit_assembly
 
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Yup. The more I hear about the Ender3, the more I hate it - it suffers from the same "you gotta change out half the printer to make a printer that isn't a piece of shit" problem as every other shitty chinese printer. At least chinese printers have mostly stopped burning down people's houses...

Meh. I'm enjoying that part of it. Lets me learn a new thing, and I enjoy that.
 
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Meh. I'm enjoying that part of it. Lets me learn a new thing, and I enjoy that.
It was my experience with the A8.

That printer taught me so much more about the nuts and bolts of 3D printing than a Prusa or Ultimaker ever could... because I had to change so much shit on it to bring it up to a reasonable standard. Would I buy another one? fuck no. Would I recommend it to someone who just wants to print shit and doesn't want to tinker? fuck no.

But I don't regret buying the printer one bit.
 
@Jehannum when you get a chance, can you lay out all the changes you've made? I need a starting point.
0) adjust the rollers so that they're making good contact on the extrusions. Not so much that they deform the rollers, but enough that the bed doesn't wiggle when you give it a tug.

1) make sure the Z rod isn't binding. I used this.

2) tension the belts. there should be enough slack that you could deflect it a few mm, but not so much that it's going to jump when the motor moves the tram it's attached to.

3) get good at leveling the bed. G0 and G1 will be your friend here, unless you just disable the stepper motors and move it around by hand. Adjust each corner until it lightly holds a sheet of A4 paper between the nozzle and the bed, then go back through and do it again.

4) dump the fake buildtac bed for a real one. I like these

5) stiffer bed springs. To make the stock springs work for the time being, take the Z end stop down a few millimeters.

6) read the matterhackers guides to successfully printing the material you're using.
- I can't get PETG to let go of the buildtac without wrecking the bed sticker, and I can't get it to stick to the glass bed at all below about 80°C bed temps, but I get a happy medium of adhesion with blue painters tape and I don't have to go through the grossness of hairspray or glue stick.
- PLA prints to anything and everything. Super forgiving, but it also shrinks significantly after print.
- none of them like to have much moisture around. That's not an issue for me, but it might be an issue for you. Try preheating the filament in the oven on low, and keep it in a sealed bag with some desiccant when you're not using it.

The non-performance mods I did make it quieter, but don't do much else. The rubber bushes will quiet the X and Y axes, but there's no way to get it into the Z motor. I also made a tray to hold the tools and memory cards between the screen and the Y extrusion.

I'm having great luck with the Sunlu PETG and the Hatchbox PLA.
 
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Making an #ikeahack, aka a proper base for one of their Rallin qi chargers that doesn't slide off my bedside table. Weighing it down with ball bearings embedded in the print.

When cramming the Rallin charger in there, I realized the center part of the Rallin charger pops out, and I could have made the base smaller.
 
Makin' dildos for my dildo maker.

Specifically, following @gee's advice and adding separately fused MOSFETs for the bed and heater block off the mainboard, so I made a dildo that'll hold them to the back of the PSU.

Also, I seem to have dicked up the MOSFET control of the hot end's cooling fan (it's always at 100% even when commanded 0, which means that either I bridged something when I soldered the daughterboard to the main, or managed to ground out the new MOSFET), and the non-MOSFET control of the board and tip cooling fans, so I ordered a new mainboard for the dildo maker that'll be here this afternoon (gonna flash it to Marlin, then install it). Seems like the safest way to not burn down my house before I go ahead and buy the fancy pants 32 bit upgrade board for the dildo maker.
 
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Makin' dildos for my dildo maker.

Specifically, following @gee's advice and adding separately fused MOSFETs for the bed and heater block off the mainboard, so I made a dildo that'll hold them to the back of the PSU.

Also, I seem to have dicked up the MOSFET control of the extruder cooling fan (it's always at 100% even when commanded 0, which means that either I bridged something when I soldered the daughterboard to the main, or managed to ground out the new MOSFET), and the non-MOSFET control of the board and tip cooling fans, so I ordered a new mainboard for the dildo maker that'll be here this afternoon (gonna flash it to Marlin, then install it). Seems like the safest way to not burn down my house before I go ahead and buy the fancy pants 32 bit upgrade board for the dildo maker.
Go to the store you got your MOSFETs, and buy some NTE585 diodes. (Or 1N5819, or MUR140, or whatever's available for a 1A/40V schottky)

Solder these to the heater/fan/heatbed terminal blocks on the underside of the board. Stripey end to positive output, ass end to the negative.

That should keep the onboard FETs out of latchup. Hell, with that done, you shouldn't need the external MOSFETs.
 
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Oh, I was bouncing messages back and forth with the 32 bit board guy... no inductive catch diodes on that one either. He's adding them but you might have to bodge them on for the 1st release of the board.
 
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Go to the store you got your MOSFETs, and buy some NTE585 diodes. (Or 1N5819, or MUR140, or whatever's available for a 1A/40V schottky)

Solder these to the heater/fan/heatbed terminal blocks on the underside of the board. Stripey end to positive output, ass end to the negative.

That should keep the onboard FETs out of latchup. Hell, with that done, you shouldn't need the external MOSFETs.
I'm more worried about the power connectors on the board moving ~20A than I am about burning the MOSFETs again.

But if the diodes will help as an additional level of protection, I'm not opposed to going out to get them.
 
Oh, I was bouncing messages back and forth with the 32 bit board guy... no inductive catch diodes on that one either. He's adding them but you might have to bodge them on for the 1st release of the board.
Well, with this bandaid, I can probably wait until he gets it right.
 
I'm more worried about the power connectors on the board moving ~20A than I am about burning the MOSFETs again.

But if the diodes will help as an additional level of protection, I'm not opposed to going out to get them.
Connectors on the board should be moving <10A since it's a 24V printer, it should be OK.

Take a pic of the bottom of the board... one fuckup that Anet did was putting thermal relief on the connector pins to make them easier to solder, wondering if Creality did the same thing. If they did, scratch back the solder mask beyond the thermal relief and put some big blobs of solder on there to provide a thermal path for the pins.