When I built my box frame i3 I got the y axis about 0.7 degrees off square from the X axis. Didn't notice for months until I tried printing something in two halved and they never lined up properly. Correcting the printer would have required building a whole new frame so I wrote a gcode post processor that skewed all the coordinates by the right amount to put the whole thing square again. Beinby Opus - Prusa i3 and variants
Printing Lego is a really good challenge to dial in your printer settings. Real lego is moulded to incredibly precise values, and getting a 3D printed piece that will "clutch" well to real lego is a challenge. The studs have to be the right diameter, the walls need to be the right thickness, the interior holes of the tubes inside the bricks need to be right, get one of those a tiny bit wrong aby Opus - Reprappers
I'd start with the 5mm threaded rod it came with. Any printer is only going to be as good as the weakest part, and you won't know what that is until it's up and running. Once it's printing you can decide if it's worth the trouble of changing to 8mm threaded or lead screws, or spend the time/money upgrading other parts of it that bug you.by Opus - General Mendel Topics
I used 2.9mm trimmer line, and it worked ok-ish. I needed to dry it well in the oven prior to printing, if you don't get it completely dry it starts spitting steam and throwing nylon everywhere (I live in a very low humidity climate, so even more important if you don't). I was printing at 270C, you'll need an all-metal hot end (I've got an E3D V5) or you'll start melting things. Results wby Opus - General
I've tried the "infill only when needed" and had it make a small difference. I think it only kicks in when the top surface of the object can self support (because its on a steep slope) and so doesn't need the infill to hold it up as it's filled in. It didn't seem that worthwhile for the amount of filament/time the few times I saw it make a difference. You might be better off with the "Infiby Opus - Slic3r
I'm printing with their white 3mm ABS at the moment, haven't had any problems at all (240C on kapton @ 100C). Diameter is close to constant @ 2.9mmby Opus - New Zealand RepRap User Group
QuoteZavashier Hi, I use Igus polymer bearings. I also own some quality SFK linear ball bearings ($12/each, one of the best equivalent of the chinese LM8UU). The SFK are great, but the polymer bearings are less expensive, more quiet, and works just fine. I don't know what brand Lulzbot resells, but the Igus can be bought directly on their website. Which particular Igus bearings did you get? Iby Opus - Reprappers
QuoteSupraGuy 2. The belt for the X axis tension is a royal pain to adjust. Have a trawl through thingiverse for x belt tensioners (like ). They let you tighten the belt by just tightening the screw on the end and also place the strain along the x smooth rods which stops the squeeze of the whole x axis. There are similar things for the y axis as well. QuoteSupraGuy 3. All of the problems assby Opus - Reprappers
Quotetmorris9 Quoteclack Mirror glass is typically tempered I have never seen a tempered mirror. Same here. I've cracked a few mirrors on my printer and none were tempered. Mirrors are still a great idea though, they're cheap, soak up more heat than transparent glass with the dark matte coating on the back, and you get to see a cool reflection of the underside of your hot end as things prinby Opus - General
I had some success printing on blue tape with nylon. It was still a bit hit'n'miss for sticking to the bed but the best I found. I was using weed-whacker nylon and printing at about 250c, so things might be different with a proper filament intended for printing rather than cutting grassby Opus - Printing
Nice idea. I had an i2 originally, and then built an i3. I did miss the fact that the i2 (for all it's faults) could be built with nothing more than threaded rod and printed plastics. No laser cut frame, or (in my case) bashed together wooden box to mount everything to. I doubt I'll pull my i3 apart to build on of these, but I think the method of construction using just threaded rods deserby Opus - General Mendel Topics
QuoteTraumflug QuoteOpusOnly downside is the shipping time. Oh, I know another downside. The major reason why these vendors can offer something that cheap is, they can copy the entire Arduino infrastructure for free. The more popular these cheapo offerings get, the more useless it becomes to develop something open source. Accordingly, buying cheap votes for technological standstill. I say the oby Opus - General
I've got two full sets of electronics (arduino, RAMPS, LCD, pololu's) from Aliexpress. They were in the order of $50 including shipping, and both have run flawlessly (one for 3 months, one for 9 months) printing pretty much every day. I know 2 is a pretty small sample, but they're definitely not 100% dodgy. I could by 4 sets for less than the price of a single set from local sellers, so evenby Opus - General
I think you'd have a lot of trouble with recessed text that small. I can see the adjacent perimeters just completely obliterating the recess. I've done features about 2 layers high and two perimeters thick that turned out well but I had to spend a lot of testing and tuning parameters in the slicer to get good results. Cura was much better at this than Slic3r, didn't try any of the others, butby Opus - Developers
The design will scale up easily, but you'll need to get the frame cut to the new size. I don't know how much extra room is in the single frame version, I built a box frame and enlarged the box a bit so I could fit a 10x10 bed in (though I'm currently only using an 8x8 heated bed)by Opus - Reprappers
If anyone sees this for sale anywhere in NZ then let us know! I'd be interested to try it as well, as long as the price isn't too extreme.by Opus - New Zealand RepRap User Group
Has anyone done/seen any experiments with variable density infill, or detection of solid regions that could be turned into interior voids? I'm printing some fossil skull models, and they're really just nig solid lumps. It's a battle between getting an infill density that the top layers don't collapse into, and printing time/plastic costs. There's so much space inside that could be empty, orby Opus - Experimental
Looks very much like an acceleration problem. When the direction of travel changes 90 degrees like that abruptly then everything tends to shake and oscillate a bit afterwards. If you turn down the acceleration values in your firmware it'll help smooth out those direction changes. Printing slower can also help. I'm still trying to completely eliminate this from my machine, but speed and accby Opus - Printing
QuoteBackEMF Is there some protection in the software? Something like: If hotend is on and temperature is less then 10C (in case the thermistor is disconnected) then stop and shut down though that still doesn’t protect from a thermistor that just doest touch the heater block. Marlin firmware got this added recently. It checks if there's power to the heater and the thermistor isn't registerinby Opus - Safety & Best Practices
I see exactly the same thing when my first layer is set too low. It smushes out the side of the extruder and gets caught by the next pass of the head. I'm printing PLA on a heated bed, and I've got the get that first z height pretty much spot on to eliminate it. There's a sweet spot between too low (and getting this bubbling/bumpy look) and too high where the first perimiters lift away at shby Opus - Printing
In theory I don't see why there should be a minimum speed that will work, you're extruder will be emitting plastic at a very low rate but it should work ok. However, you will be waiting a _very_ long time for prints to complete if all three axes are moving slowly. I start to have problems on the z axis of my Prusa i3 if I try anything more than about 5 mm/s. If all three axes are moving at thby Opus - Printing
Yep, it's an E3D hot end (V5). There's a small grub screw at the bottom of the heat block that tightens onto the heating element. Having examined everything a bit more closely I'm mystified as to the reason for the failure. The grub screw hadn't moved (i.e it took some torque to get it loosened) and the replacement heating element I'm just fitting didn't fit into the hole until I had looseneby Opus - Safety & Best Practices
And I've just seen that Marlin has added a Thermal Runaway protection feature 9 days ago! A firmware update and reading of the config file would have saved things here. Great work by the Marlin developers, definitely a fantastic and important feature. The heating element and the thermistor parting ways is a definite recipe for a serious distaster.by Opus - Safety & Best Practices
I had never though to double check the hot end heater, and had it drop out mid print last night. The thermistor no longer got heated so of course it just sat there on full power in the middle of the printed plastic. Confounding the problem was that Repetier Host then crashed, so the gcode to turn the heater off never got called. It sat there for quite a few hours glowing in the plastic. Theby Opus - Safety & Best Practices
Quotevreihen ...starting with the retraction distance and speed..... Sometimes I find I end up walking a very fine line. Too much retraction and I get filament jams, too little and I get a tiny amount of very fine stringing. I'll take a quick wave of a torch over a ruined printby Opus - Printing
I find just very quickly waving a butane torch over the object will make them vanish like magic as well.by Opus - Printing
I've been really amazed with the support structures Slic3r generates. They're offset slightly from the print, so they give enough support to hold things up, but pull away with almost no effort and leave very little evidence of ever having been there.by Opus - Printing
Quotechris33 Another thing to check is how the filament is coming of the spool if there is drag it will cause it to pull the extruder The filament is all on rolls and wound onto holder like this. They run on 608 bearings and rotate very freely. I actually tension them up a little to stop then running too freely and unrolling too much filament. I'm using 3mm PLA which is pretty inflexible sby Opus - General Mendel Topics
I've got biro springs on the bed and they work fine. You'll probably want something stronger for the extruder, you want to push the filament against the hobbed bolt/gear pretty hard to ensure it doesn't slip.by Opus - Reprappers
Quotetjb1 Quote3dkarma Because the bed moves when attached with springs, it wobbles and floats...maybe not up and down, but side to side and forward and back. This is solved by using very strong springs which negate the point of using them. It shouldn't wobble and float if the mounting screws are secure and the right size for the holes in the bed. I've got 3mm screws, 3mm holes in the bed, aby Opus - Reprappers