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"Mega Printer"

Posted by GESTi 
"Mega Printer"
February 09, 2016 04:24PM
Hello everyone smiling smiley

I am new at the world of 3D printing
And i am a visionary person.
I was thinking to make a big 3D Printer that will help me do big objects and with good quality, and i thought to make a big delta 3D Printer that can be placed in a room
but to make big objects with 100% fill and good quality everyone knows that needs a lot of time, but i was thinking to use multiple extrude diameter, so infill can be faster and it will reduce time.
Also for cooling down i am thinking to use radiator, so the hot air will not affect into the object quality
That's all i wanna reach so far, later i am thinking to make colored prints by merging the Red, Blue and Green filament (like LCD screen work) i think the colored printing could be realized.

I am looking for any tips and help to realize my "Mega 3D Printer"

(sorry for my English :/ )

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/09/2016 04:49PM by GESTi.
Re: "Mega Printer"
February 10, 2016 09:25PM
Hi Gesti,
I hope your ambitious project works out!
I only want to encourage you to be open minded and learn from others successes and failures.

So my #1 tip would be to read a lot more here before you start planning. Like this thread and many others.

There are some big technical issues when you scale a printer larger. For instance, some have started builds without understanding how much their structure will deflect, or how much power will be required to heat the build plate, or how long it will take to heat, or how much heat will be generated. That thread shows how important it is to be open to advice.

It is 10 times harder to build a huge printer that prints accurately - it must be extremely rigid - the larger it is the more mass the moving parts have and so it must move slower or make shaky prints, or miss steps! So it is even harder to make a large printer print fast. When you know the reasons why - then you will be ready.

The build plate must be extremely flat, or use PIR foam.

It must be enclosed and heated (and insulated) for most materials.

The next big hurdle is the hot-end and extruder. If you are going to print large then you will need a high volume setup. These already exist and can of course output many different extrusion widths, so I'm unsure of what you are proposing there.

Reliability needs to be your #1 requirement, because prints will take a long time. So get good electronics, like a Smoothieboard, or Duet, and print from an SD card. You may need external stepper motor drivers if you plan on using larger motors too.

I encourage you to fully model (in a CAD program) your printer before starting, and then post the images here before starting the build - there are lots of folks here that will offer (usually) good advice smiling smiley

I will stop myself now - rather than re-do all those threads I will urge you again to search here and read all you can about others who are building big printers. The time taken will be worth it.

And lastly, it would be a good idea to gain experience with a smaller build first.

FYI: Colored 3D printing uses CMYKW (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black, White) instead of RGB. Here is an example.

Hope that helps!

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/10/2016 09:26PM by Paul Wanamaker.


My printer: Raptosaur - Large Format Delta - [www.paulwanamaker.wordpress.com]
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Re: "Mega Printer"
February 25, 2016 12:18AM
i am also looking forward to this one, having multi coloured filament, what I had in mind is to analyze the stl files in the slicer that able to distinguish the polygon colour; let's say the colour represented in web colour format or something, then convert it into 8 bit rgb 0-255, use it on the extruder motors. e.g 255, 127, 32. Well, just an idea of how it might able to work out but will make the slicer program more complex (I myself not a professional programmer) but possible though
Re: "Mega Printer"
February 25, 2016 02:50AM
RepRapFirmware already allows you to drive multiple extruders in different proportions.for each move. For example, you can send G1 X4.0 Y5.1 E1.2:0.4:2.3 to tell it to extrude those amounts of filament from three exrruders during the move. But I am not aware of any slicer that can generate this style of gcode yet.



Large delta printer [miscsolutions.wordpress.com], E3D tool changer, Robotdigg SCARA printer, Crane Quad and Ormerod

Disclosure: I design Duet electronics and work on RepRapFirmware, [duet3d.com].
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