Large 3D printer for an artist

Hi,

we are a group of students for the Amsterdam University of applies science (Hogeschool van Amsterdam). We study Engineering, second year.

In the beginning of this school year we started an assignment to further design and build an 3D printer that has a printing surface of 1,5x1x1m.
Demands:
Accuracy of 1mm^2
Ability to be easily dismanteled
Print ABS
Cost less than €1100,-

We divided the project in 3 parts, the positioning system(frame), printing head and the extruder.
The extruder will melt ABS granule into an ABS wire which can be fed into the printing head.
The printing head will heat and print.
The positioning system will position the printing head.

I hope people on this forum will help us with difficulties we will encounter, I think it will help allot.

I will show some pictures of the positioning system to let you guys all have an idea of what we are making






I will try to post more about our progress and ask for information or help on this forum, hope that you guys have a good impression of our project

Cheers!

Printing in ABS on such a large surface !

Did you design a miraculous solution to warping, or are you just going to enclose the whole thing in an heated chamber ?

Anyway ; nice to see that big of a printer being built. Is there any website we can follow to see your progress ?

---

Most of my technical comments should be correct, but is THIS one ?
Anyway, as a rule of thumb, always double check what people write.

Hi,

No we haven't designed something for the warping. First we will make sure the printer is fully operating.
We do not have a website where you can see our progress but I can keep you posted through this thread.


This is the trapezoid wire that will make sure the printing head will move over the y-axis

Impressive goal and progress so far!

Great job. I wish you can reach the goal. Did you think about the time of a very large print? For example: your max volume? You will need hight speed to reduce print time. Good luck.

Why reinvent the wheel on the design, have you thought of the reapplication of standard cnc router/plasma table designs with an extended z axis? They are very solid and highly accurate with a proven track record. Many of these (open source) designs can be found on sites such as cnczone.com. As far as warping problems a heated chamber may be a solution or possibly the redesign of the extruder to allow the introduction of very fine fibers, eliminating or at the very least reducing warping concerns.

On another note, looking at previous cnc designs, the use of long threaded rods seems to cause problems with flexing and backlash and are easily clogged if not sealed completely. Screws of long length are reliable but pricey at that size, maybe some of the chain or belt designs that have been pioneered would help keep the cost down and increase reliability. Just throwing in my 2 cents.

3DB HvA,

Awesome. I want to do this! haha.

It would be a pleasure to have this posted on www.3dhacker.com. If you have YouTube videos of it too then 3dhacker.com might be a good place to showcase it along with up to 20 photo displays. 3dhacker.com is a 3D Printing Showcase site.

If interested, please register and I will remove the Anti-Spam Verification on your username so you can upload things whenever.

Andrew

Yes we know printing something very big will take a lot of time, this is one of the downsides of printing in this scale. However when we have the printer running we will look at possibility's of printing faster.

This design was chosen out of multiple designs, this was the most cost efficient design.

Thanks Andrew for the interest in our project. We will definitely take a look at your site! I must say at this moment we haven't booked a lot of building progress on the positioning system because of exams and presentations at our school. When we have significant building progress on the complete printer we will post new messages and maybe post things on your site.

Cheers!

As suggested above if you are only to use this for 3D printing you will almost certainly regret using lead screws for movement. They are extremely slow unless you buy the more expensive high pitch ones with anti backlash ball screws.

If you don't believe me have a look at this video of a delta robot with 1mm pitch lead screws (my first attempt at a printed delta)

HF Delta

Then take a look at the Rostock developed from it. It uses toothed belts.

Rostock

I was thinking about multiple heads, if they're in a row with equal spacing, in principle, along the direction, they only need to move the distance the spacing. In practice, you'd actually need the software and electronics to actually drive it!

If the costs of maintaining the machines are not too much related to the hot end and filament drive, fewer, faster machines may be better in a non-home setting.

Some mechanism to avoid needing many servos might be useful, for instance driving the bowden cables with springs and have two electromotors, one to select the spring, and the other to tighten it. Maybe then the idea of inductive heating, can be used to stop the flow. Lost the link... Anyway getting way ahead of myself.