First unbox and Build - Prusa I3X DIY Tech Shop

Hello everyone,

I have been reading the forum and using IRC for more than a month now, trying to learn about 3 printers and getting advice from many, much thanks to the veterans!! My goal for my first printer was to get a complete kit so I did not have to worry about sourcing and possibly getting wrong parts or spending all kinds of money on shipping from many different vendors.

Here I will be posting everything about my build of the DIY Tech Shop Prusa I3X. This was the cheapest Prusa I3 I could find in the US. I will post as many pictures as I can. I have done a complete inventory, down to the last nut and bolt and everything is here and in good condition!!



So I also ordered the LCD Controller, which was $40 extra. Everything else was part of the standard kit. The green plastic bag has all the plastic parts. They also provided the plastic box with all the hardware pre-sorted.

The stepper drivers come with heatsinks and heatsink tape that you must apply. I thought the heatsinks was an added bonus. The kit came with one fan, which I think is indended to cool the Ramps.

Now keep in mind, I am a newb to this. I do not think the hotend is of very high quality, but I hope to be able to make it work well enough for a while. Below is an image showing how the nozzle fits thru the heater block. There is quite an air gap around the nozzle, it is held in by a set screw, so it will not come apart, but I would think for heat transfer, you want complete surface to surface contact there. I did call Ben at DIY Tech Shop and he offered to send out a new heater block. If they are both like that, then I will probably shim the nozzle with something for heat transfer reasons. I also plan on putting a fan on the extruder to cool the peek portion of the hot end. My thought is you do not want to cool the brass hot end where the plastic flows out, but if you cool on the top by the black plastic (PEEK), it should help to prevent some jamming of the hot end. Any suggestions veterans have would be appreciated.




I am gonna have fun with this!!!

Bed Assembly: Well I assembed the bed last night, with the daughter's help. I ran into a few minor issues. First #6 bolts were supplied and they were tapered head. The holes in the PCB Heatbed MK2a were slightly too small for the #6 bolts. I decided to ream the holes just slightly. The problem is that the holes are very close to the edge of the heatbed and there is not much support material. Next issue, the bolts/holes on the heatbed did not match exactly with the holes in the aluminum plate/bed, so there would have been too much stress on the heatbed, so I enlarged the holes in the aluminum plate with a drill a bit, and now use washers on both sides of the aluminum plate to support the springs and wing nuts. Overall the way the heatbed and the aluminum plate were shipped, I would give a B-, with my mods it is now solid and should perform well.

Hey n9jcv, we bought the same kit and I've got a quick question for you. Are all of your motors the same size, I have 5 nema 17's at 40cm, in the build documentation it states we are supposed to have one 50cm nema 17 and four 40cm's.

*and just a suggestion you could use some thermal transfer paste (artic silver etc...) to fill in that gap on the heater block. It should create a complete thermal transfer from the heater block to that tip, same stuff they use for heatsinks on CPUs.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/29/2014 12:17PM by kithrax.

When did you order your kit and when did it ship? I ordered mine January 6th with an expected ship date of the 24th. Haven't heard anything about it yet so I sent a message yesterday through their contact form and haven't heard back. I also sent a message several days ago about something unrelated, and still haven't heard anything on that.

I was pretty sure there were many others who bought this kit. I am glad to hear from any other owners.

Kithrax, I have 5 motors and 1 is slightly larger than the others. Here is a pic of 1 small and one large, but I really dont know if they are 17 or 23 or whatever, I have never had one before. Mine measure to be 40 and 47



I was not sure if the thermal paste/heatsink compound would melt/drip.

Drew: I ordered on Jan 2, and just got it yesterday. Yours should be very soon.

Thanks

Today I wired up the heat bed and tested it. No thermistor yet, but it warms up quickly on my 600Watt PC supply.
b

Thermal compound such as arctic silver is meant to be baked on when it heats up and by the gap I see in your hot end it shouldn't drip out, anyhow after a couple of hours of heat that stuff wont move at all it almost becomes a glue. Thank you for posting that picture of your motors, they are nema 17 just one is 50cm just like the build document states it should be. That means I have one more error in my shipment (missing plastic parts, missing hot end, and now missing the right sized motor). Good to know I can check out your build, I'll post mine when I get everything here. I purchased on December 30th, received my kit on Jan 28th and am waiting on the missing parts.

So, I did some more building tonight;
I assembled the x carriage items, that went ok. Then I assembled the z motors to the mount and to the frame. I ran into a bit of difficulty here. The problem was with the z motor mount and the z motors. Something was not to spec, either the motors or the plastic z motor mounts. Where the shaft of the motor protrudes, there is a collar like on the motor case. The motor mount would not sit flush on one side due to this collar. So I pulled out the dremel, only needed to remove a very small arch shaped amount and now they sit flush.

The backsplash top assembly was done also and no problems here.

The small extruder hinge, that only has a grub and a bearing, presented another slight difficulty. Where the grub sits, the plastic protruded inward on both sides too far and you could not get the bearing in. Out came a flat file, a few minutes of filing, and now all fits properly. Then, I proceeded with the remaining Extruder Gregs/Wade body. A lot of cleanup was necessary on this part. On one side where the bearing sits, it is not flat inside, I tried to flatten, but there is not much material there and did not want to poke thru anything. Next was to attach the extruder hotend clamp/mount to the bottom of the extruder body. The attaching was easy, but I also decided to test fit the hot end. Good thing I did. The hotend clamp/mount/plastic part was a problem. I looked at it from the side. It appeared that this part shifted by 2 or 3 mm mid print. This creates an issue then for the hot end to slide into a very tight fitting center slide of sorts. I did a lot of cleanup here. Eventually I was able to get the hot end mounted. I am not sure this is going to work though and will probably request a new replacement part for this hot end mount.

Many of my plastic pieces look like they were printed on a machine with a serious z wobble issue (I have see pics and read posts about that). Some parts are not so critical and it is not a big deal but others this is a problem. I mounted the motor to the extruder. The gear had to be reamed quite substantially as the hole was the same size as a smaller motor, but the larger motor has a slightly larger shaft. I assume I did this correctly and used the larger motor for the extruder?

Oh, one more thing, the fan mount, boy that is a real piece of crap, both the actual printed part, all stringy and very fragile and the design of it, I feel like I could have made a much simplier fan mount with less plastic and much stronger. It will have to do until I can print another one.

I am soon realizing, I need to get this printer going just to print replacement parts and upgrades. But that does sound like fun!

Tomorrow I will continue, with the gears and hobbed bolt on the extruder. Here is a picture from the build nite tonight.

Thermal paste seems like a good solution to your hotend problem, I would use artic silver 5 (you should be able to find a syringe of it at frys electronics for pretty cheap). You may have to use another adhesive to hold the resistor in place because thermal paste is not very sticky when it is warmed up from a cpu, or in this case a resistor. that being said, be careful when selecting thermal paste because typically, the paste is not designed to go too far over 100 degrees celsius. Thermal paste is a great conductor of heat, but I am not sure if there is a maximum temperature before it burns or something. Maybe put some glue on either side of the resistor to hold it in place? That should work, but I would just be worried about burning whatever holds the resistor in place. Good luck

According to the MSDS Arctic Silver boils at <200C which is too low... I guess a press fit is the best you can do for now, Ill look into some other solutions...

Mac, I think you mis-understood. I am not trying to hold a resistor in place, I am trying to fill the gap around the hot end and the heater block, see pic above. I do have Artic Silver 5 from my computer build. But this is what the vendor says about it;
Extended Temperature Limits:
Peak: –50°C to >180°C
Long-Term: –50°C to 130°C
I don't think that is quite up to 200C+. Any other suggestions?


And now some further news on my build. I did a lot last night. I finished the extruder, with the gears, hobbed bolt, etc. I also assembled the rod frame. I cracked one of the rod platic corners, tightened too much, although I think it was more a case of the part being printed with a very low % fill. Anyway, I called DIY Tech and they are sending me out a replacement part along with 2 others that had issues with them.

Tonight I attached the rod frame to the aluminum backplate and attached the rear supports to the aluminum. This appears to be fairly stable. All 5 motors are now mounted. I had to call DIY Tech with a question on this but would love to hear from others; The X carriage assembly that moves left/right - has 2 rods. The plastic they go into on the left side, has holes recessed about 1 inch, I pushed them all the way in. The plastic piece on the right has holes that go all the way thru, When I lined up the Z smooth rod, the x smooth rods were only in the plastic piece on the right to a depth of about 1/4 inch. The x smooth rods are about 370mm. It appears only friction from the plastic parts holds the rods in - I am not a fan of this set up, not sure if this is standard I3 or what. I am thinking what I may do to make this better, any suggestions?

I have not yet attached the z threaded rods, there are not any instructions on this. I know to use the plastic tube and zip ties on the bottom, but not sure on what to do at the top. There is one hole on each side, but it is blocked, I will need to drill out, I think I probably need nuts on top and bottom of the x carriage plastic piece? Anyone have any pics of this?

Also, I am a bit stuck on the belts the Y and X motors have plastic gears, not the GT2, but I have 2 belts and 2 plastic GT2 gears. I dont know where the GT2 gears go. Help!!

Attached is a pic of current progress.

Z threaded rods - I know people have used wire ties to make the clear sleeves tight, but I haven't done that. When you start printing you will run into mistakes and one will be going to far into the bed with your z axis. If there is no wire ties, the threaded rods come right out of the sleeves and take the pressure off the bed. Maybe I will do it later.

The smooth z axis rods. Not only do you have to drill out the holes to make them work, they have to be a tight fit. My parts were printed out of square. I now have a hose clamp attached to the top of one rod to keep it from slipping when used. They can't move up and down at all, as soon as they do, your z-axis will be off for the print.

DIT Tech Shop - They are fantastic at sending out parts and they started off being very helpful in answering questions. I have found they are no longer answering my calls. Maybe I asked too many questions...ha ha.

The set up for making your plate perpendicular to the surface your printer is on is poor at best. Here's what I did, and am doing. I got a piece of corian to place my printer on. Think about it. Without the corian, everytime you move your printer to a different surface, it will be out of whack of not a level surface. Using the corian, if I adjust the printer to the corian, all I have to do is level the corian each time. I am printing levelers to use under the corian. I am also building a frame around the entire printer. It will hold the spool of plastic, the power supply, and I will use it to hold the plate perpendicular. Then I plan on removing the support rods in the back.

Lots of luck with the electronics. I found the build rather easy. The electronics is very challenging. Feel free to pm me with questions. I've been through it all. I'm three months in and still calibrating and tweeking, but I am printing some great pieces.

and another thing...ha ha.

I would start a new thread on each new post. I find it hard to follow the train of thought on one long thread. Just a thought!

wow, I just started my build and I second the fact that this printer will be used to replace its plastic parts o.O my X carriage assembly took a lot of filing it looks like the printer wobbled during the print!

Did some searching in the forums, one user used exhaust repair paste (holts fire gum) to fill the gap on his hot end...

Kithrax, let me know how your build goes.

Tonight I adjusted some things. I had the rear supports on incorrectly and they prevented the bed from moving all the way back in the Y axis. I made some other adjustments. All my axes now have a smooth motion to them. I also reamed out the x carriage pieces so the nut and the 5mm threaded rods for the z axis could be installed. I still need to do the belts, and plastic tubing on the z axis then I think I am about ready to start the electronics.

Kithrax and others, share pics of your builds as well!!

Kithrax, I have a I3X, do you also or the I3XL?

b

I also have the I3X, I figured I could upgrade it to a bigger bed with the knowledge of how to build this one. I've got pics and will start my post. Almost every step of the way I've done 15 minutes of reaming to clean up the parts for a fit, how do you feel about these zip tied endstops?

Hi,
Well there is a lot to address here.
I personally want to thank you for your post the feedback is #1!
We will address the posts per post.
We have up till now been trying to use a common nuts and bolts kit, so we will be adding to the kit,
4 m3 x 20 mm bolts
8 m3 nuts for use on the heated bed.

the #6 bolts will still be sent for the 9x12 beds.

---

Through self sustaining actions comes freedom

DIY Tech Shop

Any parts that need replacement we ALWAYS replace!

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Through self sustaining actions comes freedom

DIY Tech Shop

Hotends, we always replace any part plastics, hot-ends, motors, electronics, rods need to be sent back to us or pictures to see what is going on.

---

Through self sustaining actions comes freedom

DIY Tech Shop

I ordered the I3alpha and boy are you guys posting the steps making me anxious. I can't wait for it to arrive.

My impression is that DIY Tech Shop is a smaller company (my order number was in the 800s) that has been getting a lot more orders than they are used to, which is probably what is causing the rushed prints, unanswered tech calls, etc.

That being said, aside from the printed parts, which it sounds like you are getting replaced, from what I can see these are mostly quality parts for the cheapest machine you can order pretty much anywhere. I have done just a ridiculous amount of sourcing, comparison shopping, and number crunching and I have seen significantly more expensive kits with much lower quality. I've run across people who had to go so far as to hack together wooden parts to use to print replacement plastic for their plastic ends and received "fully assembled" electronics which were missing pieces or just all the electronics chucked into a bag without any solder having come near them.

No they're not paying me to say this. I'm just trying to make myself feel better about the investment while I wait for mine to arrive. It should get here Wednesday according to the shipper and then we can compare quality on the upgraded kit.

Additional status - Continued the build tonight. I installed the belts. Seems I am having trouble keeping the belts running on the bearings. I tried different amounts of tension, but the belts always seem to walk one way or another. They Y is the easiest to get at and align, I aligned both the motor and the bearing with the bed y belt mount but it still seems to go to one side of the other. Not sure what to do about this. I do not want any drag on the movement if it rubs against the plastic and do not want it to wear. Any ideas?

I installed the z threaded rods and the tubing that seemed to go alright. I could not figure how to get the endstops mounted. It seems the endstops I have are not of the right size, I dont know. Then end stop for y in the manual shows mounting on the far rear left corner of the smooth rod, but the bed actually needs to move beyond that point so you can print at the front of the bed. Not sure what to do here. Any ideas. A picture of the endstop is included here.





Also, one of my plastics split, which I already called for a replacement, but in the mean time I am using a zip tie to hold it together, I saw this on another site. Hopefully this will hold it together til I get my replacement.


Next is to start the electronics

Mrpaulie, I agree, I think they had the best price for mostly quality components and a complete kit, minus the power supply which I already had anyway. I think they outsource the plastics and the ones I got are of lower quality, most will work but a few had issues and broke, but they said they would send them right out so hopefully I will have by the middle of the week. Every time I called they answered and were helpful with questions and replacements, so you can't ask for more than that.
b

In my experience DYI Always replaces any parts and does it quickly!!!!!

Well sir, I finally got all the electronics up, but now I am stuck getting the ramps/arduino to do anything in pronterface... Got some more troubleshooting to do

Let us know what wasn't working and what you did to get it working. I'm going to be buying this kit in the coming weeks and I would really like to know what sort of pitfalls exist.

Progress Update,

I have been very busy continuing with this build. My last post finished up the hardware (nuts/bolts, etc). All along I have taken my time on this kit, I am careful not to rush things. I want them all to be exact, or at least to the best of my abilities.

My next step was to cut a piece of 3/4 inch birch plywood. I wanted to mount my I3X on the plywood, so I could move it from one place to another, without have to worry I would mess up the calibration. Here is a pic of my I3X mounted on plywood. I just used 2 conduit clamps to secure it to the plywood. Then I used an L to ensure the frame was 90 degrees to the plywood and tightened down the back support braces to hold this position.


Then I moved on to the electronics. I have done a lot of computer modding in my days. So I pulled from that experience. I am using a 600 Watt ATX computer power supply, with lighted fans inside. I made the decision to sleeve all of my wiring in PET sleeving like used in computer mods. I also decided to just toss the crimp connectors supplied with the kit, into my spare parts box. I much prefer soldered connections, and being a Ham Radio operator (builder of radios), I have plenty of soldering experience. So needless to say, the soldering, sleeving all took much longer to complete than just some random wiring. Mostly the sleeving is on the visible sides. I generally left 6 inches on the Ramps/connector side unsleeved. I will be putting that entire bundle in a plastic tube at some point once I know everything is pretty much final.

I first tested just the heat bed hooked directly to the power supply and that worked. Then I tested my hot end heater hooked to the power supply directly. Then I moved on to start hooking up the Ramps board. The RepRap Wiki has a very good doc on Ramps 1.4 and you can enlarge a parts overlay/pinout diagram. This is very helpful, as there are so many pins on the Ramps board. It is really not possible to know when you hook up the steppers if they are 180 degrees reversed, but good news is you can swap it later, either physically or in the firmware(marlin). I made the decision to put the arduino/ramps at the bottom of the frame and a fan above it. My power leads for ramps are at the bottom and the stepper drivers at the top closest to the fan for the best cooling.

I installed the heatsinks on the Ramps. This is a touchy step. The heatsinks seemed too large and I placed them on their side as they were narrower that way. I used the tape (double sided supplied). I used a piece of tape just slightly large to prevent the heatsink from shorting out any surface mount components.

The heatbed should be hooked to D10. Initially I had it hooked to D9 and I issued a g code to turn the fan on and the fan just sat there, 5 minutes later I noticed my kapton tape on the hot end working a bit loose and realized the hotend was hot, cause it was on D9. I decided just to hardwire the fan to the power supply (always on) and moved the heatbed to D10.

The firmware supplied for download from DIY Tech does not have any support for the LCD. I purchased the LCD with the kit. Someone else with a I3X shared working Marlin firmware with me. I will post that firmware here later, it is not warranted in any way, use at your own risk, but it is working for me. This seems to be typical of DIY Tech, the pdf manual is not up to date, it is missing entire steps, and the firmware was not what was needed. This I guess is a case of "you get what you pay for". Examples, the pdf shows acorn nuts on the back braces, but no acorn nuts are supplied. The pdf does not show how to mount the z threaded rods. You see one pic, not threaded rod, then the next pic has threaded rod already installed. Stuff like that. So I used google and other build manuals for reference.

I should also mention all the help I got at the RepRap IRC. Those guys are all great!!! They never seem to tire of answering questions, and they saved me many times.

Once all the wiring was completed, then I plugged the Ramps board into the Arduino board and mounted the board on the frame. DIY Tech supplies a fan to cool the board, but I opted to use a 80cm computer lighted fan. The fan mount is poor design and very poor printed parts quality (all stringy). I called and got a replacement, but the replacement was actually worse quality (more stringy). I will print my own as soon as I print endstops first. That was another sore point. The instructions are to zip tie the endstops. This just does not work well, they are not real secure and in some cases you have a hard time finding suitable mounting for a zip tie and a square shaped endstop. Had this kit shipped with real end stop holders, it would have only cost them $1 more, it would have been so much better. Endstops are critical - especially Z to getting your first prints, this should have been included, IMHO.

Next I downloaded the Arduino software and Pronterface. I then put the marlin firmware on the Arduino board. Then I began to use Pronterface. Pronterface was pretty easy to use. This is where I discovered I had steppers wired 180 degrees off. I also adjusted the vref voltage on the stepper drivers. This is CRITICAL and you can not skip this step. My X and Y are at about .87 volts and my Z is at 1.13. Yes 1.13 seems high, but below this it does not work reliably and both my stepper motors and the driver are cool to the touch for Z so I am confident this is ok. The fact that there are 2 motors on the same stepper driver for Z is probably why Z vref needs to be higher. I purchased a ceramic screwdriver to adjust them, so you can do it while powered on. If you use a metal blade you must power off the printer first otherwise you will short a stepper driver and have to buy a new one. You use a volt meter on the ground and the center of the potentiometer on the stepper driver to read the voltage.

I used Pronterface to test x, y and z movement, test homing each axis separately and home everything. I tested the hot end and heat bed, and I tested extruding (without) heat or plastic. To test extrude without heat or plastic you need to comment out Prevent Dangerous Extrude in the firmware, but please REMEMBER to put back.

Then I leveled the bed. I put the springs and wing nuts in the spare parts pile. I wanted a secure level bed that I did not have to fiddle with or worry about changing. I just use nuts and bolts. This turned out for me to be very easy. I think the key was the process. I read somewhere (wiki?) to level, you start in front left corner, the rear right corner, then front right corner and then rear left corner. I did this, it was easy and all 4 corners are now just a paper thick ness below the hot end.

And finally last night, I calibrated the Extruder feed rate. This step is also CRITICAL. Do not be tempted to skip. This site has an excellent procedure.
[richrap.blogspot.com]

When I told it to extrude 30mm it actually extruded 38mm. I went thru the calculations and changed my feedrate in the config file and BAM, now when I say 30mm, it extrudes 30mm. Wow! I was so happy at this point to actually see hot plastic being extruded!!!! It was late and I could not share my excitement with the family as they were sleeping.

I have some calibration left and hope to have a first print very soon, too bad I have to work, sleep, etc ha ha

I would be glad to help anyone else with this kit. As soon as I print my first object, I will post a picture of it!

Just wanted to say thanks for the write up! My kit gets here Thursday and I plan on starting my build as soon as possible after that. Nice to know ill have you to follow!

Lovin that plywood base!!!

Like I said before, I used corian.

I built a pvc frame around the printer. I'm hoping to place the filament roll and power supply up top!

First thing I did was attach a half inch pvc piece to the right frame, now I can remove the stupid angled brace in the back, and now my frame is perpendicular.

Did I mention I'm printing levelers to place the base on as we talk!!!!

Love it!!!!