We found the BEST belt tension for 3D printers
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- Опубліковано 31 лип 2024
- How to adjust the timing belt tension: prorifi3d.com/pages/how-to-tu...
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Timing belt tension data sharing platform: github.com/Prorifi3D-Official...
In this video,we find out what is the best timing belt tension for your printer and how it affects print quality and accuracy.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction
00:30 Background Knowledge
02:40 Common Tension Chart
02:55 Tension & Accuracy
05:31 Tension & Quality
08:43 Best tension verified
09:30 Tune the belt
09:55 Further improvement
10:23 Tension & Ringing - Наука та технологія
![Lp. Последняя Реальность #107 РОДНОЙ ДОМ [Финал] • Майнкрафт](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/IK3QKzKUlHM/mqdefault.jpg)
It felt like I put an academic paper through a text-to-speech application, very well-researched with a clear methodology.
Thank you for your approval!
@@Prorifi3D the Edge Browser Text to Speech voice sounds pretty good
This is better than most academic research that I read. Very thorough and logical. 10/10.
Not a fan of the robot voice, but the content earned a sub! Interesting stuff.
I going to sleep
Thank you for your approval and support!
Get rid of robot voice please
Indeed, I hope you can create your own voiceovers instead of the robot
I love when you click a video and the highlighted comment says the video is valuable
Normally I will block all text to speech videos, but the quality of the information here is so good that I am subscribing!
Extraordinary, well constructed and executed experiment and video script. Thanks for the contribution to the community. This video deserves more views and attention.
Another thing to consider is using the correct idler: many printers use smooth idlers on the toothed side of the belt. This will cause resonance.
Exactly! This bothered me right off the bat, for example, on AnyCubic printers, and it indeed has a visible effect.
I haven't tested it (yet), but I also believe that different tooth profile shape also causes different visoble effects. For example a HTD-3M semi-circle profile belt engages more softly with the pully than a trapezoidal XL, MXL or GT2 belt. I haven't tested it yet this professionally on a 3D printer, but in other applications I hear them less noisy.
Eww eww eww why would they do that?!
@@gabiold i would bet that most 3d printer manufacturers don't actually hire real engineers
@@schizophrenicgaming365 I recently returned a Creality K1 because of that, not only where tooth sides running on small smooth idlers but the belts also didn't line up and caused a 0.8-1.6% deformation on parts near the edges and sides
Really nice research and testing! It's good to have thorough experimental data on this.
Thanks for the support!
Thanks for sharing such an informative study with precise real-world measurements.
Thank you for your approval! We'll be releasing more videos later!
Ha ha ha, of course you would be commenting here :) Hello @MihaiDesigns
I hang a 20g scale weight from the center point of my X axis belts, then use the measurement between the 2 sides of the belt as a reference point to start with. For my Y axis belt, which is a vertical mount, I use a DIY 3D printed - open ended - wedge that fits between the belt and the rail - and use the deflection of the 2 sides of the wedge to get a reference point. As I run through prints, I use these reference points to adjust belt tensions. It takes time, but now I have a stable belt tension setup and my prints get great results.
It's always an exciting day to be into 3d printing! Thanks for sharing!
Yup! Thank you for your support!
Great research!! Thanks for sharing
wow! That's amazing testing
This should have more than 52k views, it's great.
Thank you for sharing. You have done a great research.
Thank you very much for your support!
Great video and great tool thank you!
thank you, this really helped!
Excellent. Thank you.
nice approach!
Thank you for your support!
loved the scientific approach! super neat
Thank you for your support!
One of the most educational videos I've seen on 3d printers! Has anybody tried the ender 3 v2 for an optimal tension, couldn't find data for that in the given link
For ender 3v2 we do not have an official value, but in the tension guide, there is a tension table calculator to help you find the optimum tension on your own.
Very nice for voron v0! Looking forward to upgrading my motorsa
Thank You sir
Great video. Thanks
Thank you for your support!
Excellent
Thank you for your support!
Very detailed, a lot of work went into this thankyou. Next please test how the tension affects accuracy with increasing speed and acceleration. Also what about a genuine gates Vs copy as genuine gates belts appear a lot stiffer
Thank you for the advice! These are great topics to research on!
Well done.
Thanks!
Can't wait to see gcode based input shaping!
I wonder if my belt tension is causing my extrusions on top layers to be looking good one direction but bad when it travels in the opposite direction? I notice it when I print a brim.
Excellent video thanks!! I may have missed it but how do I actually set my belt tension to a specific lbs? Is there a chart that converts lbs to frequency?
Excellent investigation
Thanks!
The best tension i found is to hand pull and tighten. The knobs make you lose that leveling or feeling of tightness. Extremly hard to find the right tension with the fancy belt tensioners
Super nice and interesting video
Thanks!
Nice video but i it would be nice to know how are closed loop steppers are effeted by the belt tention ?
Do you plan on developing a 0.9 degree motor at all?
I know 0.9 degree motors are usually used because the MMR that they produce is higher frequency and (usually) lower amplitude, but they also have the benefit of additional resolution, especially when used on the Z Axis.
This makes me think that it would be interesting to add a load cell "weight" sensor to a printer's axis, and with something like HX711 you could measure the weight created by the belt during the actual ongoing printing on the printer itself. Much cheaper than an optical sensor like used in this video, and can be cheaply added for each of the axis on a budget 3D printer.
Sounds like you got yourself a great video idea.
Interesting but, they weren't measuring the tension on the belt with the optical sensor. What benefits would measuring the belt tension on the fly provide?
@@JeanSolagnier my guess is that it would be possible to find when tension changes because of velocity/acceleration fluctuations during movement. And then an algorithm could be used to reduce the fluctuations in tension, leading to a more stable tension for the duration of the print. The hypothesis being that a more stable tension during extrusions will lead to more even extrusions and thus less surface artifacts.
Using a load cell snsor is a different approach to be researched, but obtaining the "force" signal does not directly indicate the change in position, and the resolution and accuracy of this approach is unclear. In our research, we have used an optical linear rail that has 1um resolution.
I tried this motor QSH4218-47-28-040 and it had way less motor vibrations than the other three types I had at home. Then I tried DM542 and it made it vibrate even less than the Tmc2209.
Have not tested ny more.
However Gecko driver makers said that the low inductance (600 uh) of the motor above will give too high ripple current with switching drivers.
Can you run pulleys with gears vs the "flat" bearings? Most of my ripple was removed by changing idlers to toothed bearings. Not sure who thought belt teeth bouncing over a hump would be a good idea?
It's cheaper.
@@TheFoodnipple marginally at the cost of quality
This is a very interesting topic to research. Thank you for your topic suggestion!
Always wanted to test a toothed pulley to mitigate ripples. thanks for sharing
@@jordandotan Nero made a comment today suggesting if it was a problem it was more due to belt tension. Which I can agree with in part especially if really tight. But I removed the extra idler entirely on the ender 3, at the back and used a toothed pulley up front. The belt teeth bumping up onto the back tensioner idler was a big source. You could feel it moving the bed. bump-bump-bump
could you please share the value of “belt test” in mk3. For normal user . We are hard to measure the lbs of belt like3.5 or 4.5. Thanks a lot.
this is interesting but you have to also consider the radial force that the motor shaft can actually sustain (which depending on the pulley position might not be that much).
This is indeed an additional problem to consider as well, thank you very much for your advice!
Do these experiments apply to CoreXY printers as well?
Great content. But that robot voice sounds like all those scam videos on UA-cam.
Thank you for your advice!
great investigation.
it would be nice if you could also test the Voron 2.4
For Voron 2.4 we do not have an official value yet, but in the tension guide there is a tension table calculator and instructions to help you find the optimum tension on your own!
How about tensions vs speed, accel?
How about CoreXY systems ? Can your calculator work with them ?
I think the smooth idler on Prusa is a design error that emphasises belt pitch artefacts.
I can’t remember exactly where I saw / read it, but a while ago someone did test that hypothesis and could not find any difference between smooth and teethed idlers…
@@UloPe Well i have an opposite opinion from my first hand experience, i don't have rigorous test results, but at higher tensions it does feel a lot more consistent by hand feel when hand jogging. However it took me a few tries to get toothed idlers from China which were actually machined deeply enough and had bearings good enough to actually work, and the good ones weren't all that cheap. At lower tensions it's probably less relevant but at lower tensions you have more belt compliance and vibration, you're supposed to have more preload. Did you know the belt is undersized and reaches the nominal 2mm/tooth pitch only at pretty high tensions? Unfortunately stretching the belt to spec is also a little borderline and ruins the printer stepper bearings, since you're supposed to not have the shaft just stick out unsupported with that much of a side load... Anyway i'm the sort of person to add more belt tension, add more stepper current, add more PCB cooling, and then juggle the consequences with pleasure. If the printer can't break your arm, is it even a real printer?
@@SianaGearz 😂😂
If I remember I’ll try to look up the source, it’s also of course possible I’m misremembering.
@@UloPe I do think quite a few people concluded that toothed idlers aren't needed or all that useful, from tests or first hand experience; but you'll also find quite a few people who swear by them.
I think ultimately that's the thing, if a toothed idler binds, even momentarily, you're in for a rude surprise. If a smooth one binds due to bearing fault, you're not even going to notice it most likely, and you can get much bigger bearings for a given idler size. It's kind of a design meme to just use flanged bearings as iders, these are super robust because they have big balls and spacious cages, so even if one is a little worse off, it's still going to be fine.
So for a manufacturer, regardless of possible advantages of a toothed idler, it's just much safer to use smooth ones, less complaints less warranty less service to do, quality be secondary. Also like on something like Prusa earlier generations there's an extruder stepper and gears imprinting on the extrusion bead, there's a high frequency pattern there that will cover up any pattern from the belt chatter. Now that MK4 has an actually amazingly well designed extruder, other sources of disturbance should be paid more attention to.
@@SianaGearz Btw, the tear smileys were directed at the arm breaking joke, not your opinion in general 😅
Come on, put the metric system on the site plsss..
We love the metric system but the Gates uses lb in their official guide. 😉
if the belt length is different in x and y then it will sound different for the same tension
The correct values for an ender 3 would be nice
Can you contact Bambu Labs and discuss with them the impact of using smooth idlers on the toothed side of the belt has on print quality?!? PLEASE!
This is a great topic suggestion!
4:20 decreased or increased?
Can I use a weighing scale just to get a feel of the tension?
You can certainly give it a try.
what is with corexy belts?
The situation on the CoreXY printer is not special.
This is very interesting! Thank you for sharing!
I thought the voice was good, but I guess it triggers people now.😂
Thanks for the support! We will improve this in the following videos!
How does the speed of the carriage effect the artifacts of belt tension?
This is another interesting topic to research, thanks for the suggestion!
Loots of variables to take in to consideration for making a conclusion to mention a few: Speed, deceleration, acceleration, moving mass, structural resonance and rigidity, temperature, belt compliance.................... not easy for sure ;)
Need to update this for corexy printers.
If firmware can access motor resistance or whatever you said, then why isnt there a belt tension ui under a settings menu? Someone should do that. Just like you can jog a machines x,y,z … u could jog the belt tension.
Motor resistance isn’t a reliable measurement.
The Bambu Lab X1 Carbon can detect loose belts. It checks before each print by doing some vibrations for each axis. I thought it was just part of the input shaping, but it gave me a message to tighten the xy belts one day just as my print started. I let it continue and the print looked good, so maybe it's pretty sensitive at detecting a small change in tension. After I loosened and re-tightened the 4 screws in back for the xy tensioners, I ran the calibration test and the message went away. Still printing great! I was surprised though because I never heard of any consumer printers that detect loose belts and I never heard Bambu Lab mention it as one of its features. I wonder how many other features it has hidden away. It would make another great selling point in comparison to other printers. They 're definitely on a mission to change the game.👍
It would be difficult to find the _ideal_ tension, but you can test for some edge cases. If the belts are too loose, then the first few steps will not meet any resistance - they will just be picking up the slack. After a few steps, the slack will be taken up and the resistance will increase. That would be a clear indication that the belt is too loose.
If the belt is too tight, there will be excessive amounts of resistance due to friction on all the rotating parts. If there is an expected level of resistance known for a particular printer, then you could set an upper bound on how much would be excessive. That could be for more reasons than just the belts being too tight (dirty, in need of lubrication, misaligned, etc.), but it would still be a valuable test.
However, you couldn't tell from resistance alone what the positional accuracy is, since the very cause of this error is a difference in the motor's position and the head's position due to linkage in between (the belt). I'm not sure what the resolution is on the measurement of the motor current, but I doubt you could test for the amplitude or frequency of ringing in the belt based on those measurements. Not that it is impossible (a similar technique is used to control brushless motors), but I don't think the usual TMC stepper drivers provide this level of resolution.
Great data and summary, but you've gotta change that narrator. Nobody wants to hear a robot talk. Get a human to present and you'll have thousands of subs in no time.
Plus 1 to this
Thank you for your suggestion, we will keep working on the following videos to improve this!
And fast indian accent will clear all subs.
@@samijoukainen8289😂
what makes a motor "low vibration" ?
You can check one of our videos to find out more about low vibration motors here:ua-cam.com/video/-et5eMyLlUs/v-deo.html
i mean 2 - 4 seems like a winner here, but it seems to be tested on snail printing speed. Everyone is pushing the machines to the limit where accelerations and deceleration are much bigger than what was shown in the axis simulator. In those cases your belt will start to slip on low tension.
This video explains a lot, thanks. Marlin now has input shaping. It's still experimental, but was released in 2.1.2. Once refined in Marlin, there may be no need for an external Pi to do input shaping. Not saying that there are not other benefits to Klipper though...
Thank you for your support!
Start of the video comment, under 1 min in. My method is use my ear and listen to the belt when plucked and run it and listen to the steppers. Run input shaper and adjust based on the results above.
Lets see what they say....
I guess i am going to spend some time tomorrow messing around with my belt tensions and see whats best.
Love the content but please ditch text to voice
Thanks for the suggestion!
Thank you for the video. I painfully watched it. I wont watch it again as I cant take that voice but the info was appreciated.
Nice Video and methodology in your research, apriciate your work! But there are better TTS Engines out there.
The bambu carbon do the same with input shaping
Correction, the Klipper firmware does input shaping and it won't help with belt tension issues beyond fixing the ghosting. Input shaper is about accel/decel
@@saltwaterrook4638 The X1 can detect belt tension with it's short vibration test it does before each print. I found out when it suggested I tighten the xy belts before my print started, after loosening and re-tightening 4 screws for the tensioners I ran the calibration for Resonance Compensation and it cleared the message. So it does use that to check belt tension.
G-code imput shaper is very interesing.
👍
Why is it that you can have perfectly scientific data presented but when a computer reads the it, the credibility of said data seems to drop a few points...
Good data, but please change the robot voice
Thank you for your suggestion, we will keep working on the following videos to improve this!
How would one determine the 'shaft to shaft' distance in the calc with a CoreXY printer?
There is nothing special about the situation on the CoreXY printer, you can refer to the voron guide for more details:docs.vorondesign.com/tuning/secondary_printer_tuning.html
not all heroes wear capes
Toulouse is a City in France, no?
Mind you that your belt setup on right side is not parallel to the belt below. That creates also error in position on your setup. Many printers has this issue having the belt angled and not parallel!
The belts on our test platform are parallel.
@@Prorifi3D I think they meant the belt is not totally parallel, as we can see in 6:21, the tips of the belt are not collinear.
well... what about using threaded rods as "belts"?
Belts are the usual method due to the trade-offs involved. These can be extremely precise, as it’s what are used in printers and scanners.
Belts have less backlash.
Threaded rods are awful, but leadscrews can be very accurate. That said, belts still have less backlash. Belts are great for 3D printers and laser cutters where you are applying a relatively low force. Screws work better for higher forces like routers and mills, whose high forces would cause consider change in size of the belt (it's a spring).
TLDR?
Brilliant content but I cannot enjoy the video with that voice.
Usual scamy UA-cam channel use robot voice, but this one is not the case a lot of valuable well though engineering investigation.
So true!!!!
ORRR Chep says tighter the better, he's not down for this funny business.
This is great content, but you probably see it in the retention rating that the text to speech voice over isn't going to do you any favors, I was basically out the door upon hearing it.
This content was Amazing!!! But consider using a human voice 🙏
Thank you for your advice!
How do you accurately determine tension by pitch? I find that plucking a shorter section makes a lower sound for example.
Also don't use ai voice pls. Sounds really cheap. We don't care if you have an accent or whatever just record with your own voice :)
I really dislike videos that use text to speech…
So 4 lb? Feel like they never actually said their conclusion...
The conclusion is that the optimal belt tension depends on belt length and weight of carried load.
Check the chapter 08:43 Best tension verified.
So Chep on the Filament Friday UA-cam channel says just the opposite and his test prints proved it. The tighter the belt the better the quality of the prints. So I tried it and my print quality improved dramatically by making the belts tighter. All I see here is data, no actual proof with a 3D printed object. He's been in the 3D printing world a long time and I'll trust him over your data. The prints at the end are only first layer prints. Go watch his video and try again. Looking forward to your updated video.
ua-cam.com/video/_m9TTzEh5xM/v-deo.html
Not straight to the point!! It should be a 50 seconds video, you're very good, you should have two channels, one straight to the point, and this one for those who like expert settings
Robot voice = Me not watching any video's on this channel
Yeah, it's not just crime and drugs. It's corruption, nepotism and poverty too. Really really deep poverty too.
Excellent work but goodness the robot voice is annoying.
I don't care what you sound like in real life, a real voiceover is better!
Thank you for your suggestion.
Not a fan of computer voices
Ai generated videos, hmmm 🤔
Get a real voice over and I might consider subscribing. Info is decent... But the annoying factor counteracts it.
So the best tension is the most you can get away with, without torquing the machine? printers will eventually need more rigidity.
No, they clearly show that both too tight and too loose induce errors. Tighter belts reduced belt ripple in most cases, but increased motor resonance ripple.
nobody has contributed to the database
Man, if I can give you a tip... these videos are WAYYY too dry and technical, and not nearly "entertaining" enough. You are putting in SO much interesting and valuable work, but your videos aren't going as far (and not as many people are subscribing) because this is tooooo much in the weeds and not "entertaining" enough.
Thank you for your suggestion! We will improve this in the following videos.
That robotic voice makes my ears bleed
Pretty good information, but I can't stand a computer narrating to me. How about an actual human.
It's interesting but the annoying voice made me quit after 2 min. I just can't live with the artifacts created by text-to-speech.
Is there a transcript or something I can follow along with?