PLA should stick OK to blue painter's tape without a heated bed or chamber. Wiping the blue painter's tape with alcohol makes it a bit stickier. I'm guessing the issue is with the bed-sensing... probably it's set a smidgen too high. If it was me, I'd turn off all the bed-levelling and sensing stuff (IMHO it's more trouble than it's worth) and manually set the bed height and level & flat, asby frankvdh - General
As I feared, I am having trouble with the eSun eLastic filament. I've slowed everything down to ridiculously slow speeds (0.1mm/sec -- What is a reasonable feed rate for flexible filament?) and it still jams in the extruder. I tried a different extruder with the same outcome. It always seems to curl around underneath the drive gear and jam... see the video at DropBox (candidate for least excitby frankvdh - Delta Machines
Hi, I've been asked to print an object using flexible filament. I'm a bit leary about that, especially with a Bowden setup on my Delta. Does anyone have any hints or suggestions to pass on before I leap into it? Thanks Frankby frankvdh - Delta Machines
Probably best if you scan the drawing for us to see. In the meantime, do test the wiring to the fans as above.by frankvdh - General
Why are both fans connected to the same pin? Normally, you would have the hotend fan either on all the time, or maybe off only while the hot-end temperature is below 50C or so. The part fan is usually only on when printing bridges and overhangs. The first test I'd do would be to apply 12V to each pair of fan connectors and see if the fan runs. If it does, the problem is with the RAMPS (or firmwby frankvdh - General
If you suspect that cooling is an issue, duct-tape a 5015 blower fan in place pointing at the suspect driver, and see if that cures it. If it does, work out a long-term fix. If it doesn't, look for what is wrong. If the motor stops entirely, my guess is that you have a dry joint or similar on the board. If it was the driver itself overheating, it would be more intermittent. Don't know about theby frankvdh - Reprappers
I designed and use a simple belt tensioner Probably one of those clothes-peg springs would be just as good; I never thought of them at the time.by frankvdh - General
QuoteDjDemonD If the nozzle were screwed all the way into the heater block then it is impossible to tighten it sufficiently to the heatbreak to prevent leaking material and possibly jams, as it would tighten and bind on the heaterblock, and there are no flats on the heatbreak to hold to apply enough torque to tighten the heatbreak onto the nozzle instead of nozzle onto heatbreak (makes me wonderby frankvdh - General
Quoteleadinglights There is something particularly annoying when somebody claims that your design is their own. If I design something and somebody copies it and gets rich I wish them luck - while cursing myself for not doing that myself. However, if somebody claims that something that I have designed is their design it really gets my goat. Spot the difference below:- Plasticprince claims this asby frankvdh - General
Whether or not your thermistor is accurate really isn't all that important, so long as it is repeatable. If it was me, I'd print a temperature tower, choose the best temperature, and get on with printing.by frankvdh - General
Before worrying about the stepper current, look at your extruder and see if it is gripping the filament properly. There should be light toothmarks visible on the filament. If there isn't enough tension, the drive gear will slip, under-extrude, and fill up with scrapings.by frankvdh - Printing
Is your bed level? And, if it's not, are you using auto-bedlevelling? If the answers are "No" and "Yes", then play in *any* axis can cause an error in any other axis. What's more, the *direction* of motion of the nozzle in each axis at each layer suddenly becomes significant too. It took me *months* to finally figure out that a non-level bed and an asymmetric printing pattern (I was printing aby frankvdh - Printing
I don't think it's really a Rumba, because it only has 4 stepper drivers.by frankvdh - RAMPS Electronics
Sounds to me not so much a Slic3r thing than a shell/batch file programming thing thing. Worst case, you would write a program in some language or other (C, Java, C#, Python, Perl, whatever) to check the folder for the presence of the 4 files, run Slic3r with the appropriate command line settings, and perhaps post-process the 4 resulting G-code files into a single one.by frankvdh - General
I take it that this photo is showing the object upside-down? That, when it's printed, there is open space underneath the nozzle when it's printing above the circle? That's called a bridge. The best answer is to design around that, so that you don't print long bridges. I can't see what's on the other side of your object, but if you rotate it 90 degrees so that the face with the circle in in it iby frankvdh - Printing
Is this Marlin or Repetier or RepRap Firmware or your own homebrew firmware? Probably it would be a good idea to identify exactly what firmware you're talking about, and post your request in the appropriate Software forum?by frankvdh - Developers
Agree that good bed sensing and auto-levelling would be great, and probably a must for a consumer 3D printer. I just haven't seen one yet. Really, in terms of development we're in the 1970s in terms of PCs. Back then, IBM would sell you a genuine PC/XT for $10K, or you could buy a Chinese knock-off for $1500. Colour was still somewhere in the future. No-one had developed a GUI, so everyone had tby frankvdh - General
It needs to work out-of-the-box. The customer must have their first successful print (not calibration items) in their hand within 24 hours of opening the box. Or, if it's a kit, within 24 hours of the kit being fully assembled. So, very clear instructions on how to calibrate & set up the printer. It probably also means providing slicing software pre-configured with the right settings for theby frankvdh - General
Beware also that the movement of the extruder relative to the filament source can cause other issues. On my PrintrBot, the PLA filament wore away the edge of the hole leading into the top of the aluminium extruder, eventually making it keyhole-shaped and causing jams. My fix for this was to drill out and tap the hole for M6, and put in a section of a broken stainless steel heat break.by frankvdh - Mechanics
QuoteTrakyan If anyone would have patented it, it would be stratasys. So maybe it's patented by Stratasys (or someone else) and licensed by Bondtech?by frankvdh - General
A couple of quick comments; The amount of force needed to pull filament off the spool seems to me to be an order of magnitude less than what's needed to push it through the hot-end. In the end, if your extruder doesn't have excess power to pull the filament from the spool *and* push it through the hot-end simultaneously, you're doomed, no matter how you arrange things. An easy mitigation is toby frankvdh - Mechanics
I compared your Repetier Configuration.h with what works on my machine. I have a Zonestar ZRIB controller rather than RAMPS, so some differences are expected. But I notice that you seem to be inverting X,Y, Z direction and endstops whereas I don't. I've attached my Configuration.h for you to look at.by frankvdh - General
I'm wondering whether you have the right tower connected to the correct stepper port, so that motors don't match to end-stops? It would be helpful if you attached your Configuration.h file to this thread.by frankvdh - General
I think you've misunderstood some terminology. The thermistor is a little bead at the then of two thin wires that varies its resistance depending on voltage. It is normally inside the heater block, and nowhere near the extruder or carriage. The hot-end is the combination of the heatsink, heat-break, heater-block, nozzle, thermistor, and heating element. Some of these may be combined into modulesby frankvdh - Reprappers
QuoteTrakyan I think it might also decrease print time since you don't need to constantly travel between parts. Or it might increase the print time, because you have to allow one layer to cool before printing the next. I guess a good print cooling fan would be a significant advantage.by frankvdh - General
30mm blower fans are *way* more expensive (~$8 each on AliExpress, vs $1.25 for a 50mm one), and 12V ones aren't common, (Hopefully someone will point me to a cheaper source!) and do half the airflow (1.85CFM vs 3.6CFM for a 50mm). So I (being a cheapskate) would always go for 1 * 50mm fan over 2 * 30mm fans. OTOH, 3.6CFM is way too much for print cooling, so probably 1 * 30mm fan would be goodby frankvdh - Delta Machines
Typically, systems become optimised at a "sweet spot" where several bottlenecks coincide. When you want to move away from that sweet spot (increased size and speed) you'll need to bypass those bottlenecks. An ad hoc process of resolving one bottleneck at a time will just expose another, and another, and another, and you may end up repeatedly changing the same item. I'd suggest doing a bit of engby frankvdh - Printing
My delta came with a bed-sensing mechanism similar to this. It wasn't worth the trouble, and I've been happily printing with *no* height sensing at all for years. A key aspect in your design is the axis/hinge; any play in this hinge will be magnified by the length of the rocker arm when bed-sensing. Similarly, any play in the hinge will be magnified by the distance to the nozzle whilst printing.by frankvdh - Delta Machines
I don't think it matters too much if your carriage wheels are badly aligned or anything like that. So long as they're round and they roll up and down the tower, they're good. I don't see any kind of tensioning on your drive belts. Any play in the belt will cause distortion. You can print some simple belt tensioners. What is really important is that each pair of diagonal rods forms a parallelogby frankvdh - Delta Machines
I'll add one more request for a long-standing "bug" to be fixed... If I've started saving a file, don't let me exit the program until it's done. Currently, when generating a gcode file, if I'm not thinking and not watching the little progress bar, I sometimes exit Slic3r before the gcode has been fully written to the file. Of course, this is more likely to happen with a big and complex model beiby frankvdh - Slic3r