Tantillus Belt driven

I have had my Tantillus running a week now and its printing really well. One thing that has bothered me is the gears. They make a lot of noise and they wear/change shape/size. They also wobble a little bit.

For an experiment I fitted timing pulleys and timing belts in place of the X,Y gears and fired the machine up. See picture linked

www.pitstock.com/tantillus/Belt_Tanty.jpg

The machine is now much quieter, you can really hear the steppers singing their tune nice and clearly. I can run prints really fast as it shakes a lot less, I need to get the flow and heat right for this as the fast print I did had delamination issues (speed = 200). I can run the machine in the house over night without the noise. No more wobbles and clacking noises. I am stoked.

I know this is not the "reprap" way but I think it is a really good upgrade for a machine that is going to do a lot of work hours. I wonder if you could at least print the timing pulleys?

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I wonder if you could at least print the timing pulleys?

Unless you can print perfect circles with absolutely zero runout the answer is no.

Any non-circularity in the pulleys will affect the position of the head and therefore your accuracy. Printed gears are less susceptible to this issue because there is a range of distances over which the teeth stay in mesh.

There are printed pulleys in the Tantillus repo for GT3 belts. The part number of the belts is in the readme.

The gears were not my first idea. I planned to use belts but I was impatient and had some gregs wades triffid gears lying around so I installed them on the upper shafts and quickly modded some for the motors and they worked well so they stuck. I do agree the belts are quieter but I like the prints from my geared machine more than my belt driven one.

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I'm curious where you got your pulleys. I got mine from fleebay and they ended up being much smaller. I'm also not very happy with the belts I got as they are a bit narrow. Waiting for a new set from robotdigg now.

I had the belts and pulleys in my stock pile of trinkets. They came from a very expensive Noritsu film processor that I got to scrap. I expect the quality would be that of Misumi pulleys.

The belts are 132MXL~6.5mm wide and the pulleys have an OD of about 38mm. In my opinion you need large pulleys like this to get great results as they always have a lot of teeth engaged so backlash just isn't detectable. These belts and pulleys fit perfectly in place. Any bigger and the stepper motor screws might be inaccessable.

I will get some video up soon that shows how smooth it all runs.

Some people asked what the belt driven printer sounded like, so here is some video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-5sdCndlLY&

Sorry about the crappy camera!

A better quality video

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfkB6idPDPU