CNC Mill upgrades, SLS 3D printing, building 3 Vorons, and exploring some of my favorite projects to make in my garage - 2021 was a content packed year! As I move onto larger projects, I will stay true to my style of dissecting all elements of the machines and products that I am building. I will catch you guys in 2022 🎉
first video I've ever seen on your channel. I'm 300+ lbs. Do you think you could print me some chairs and what would you charge? 2:20 do you experience feedstock binding?
At this scale I'm imagining a granite slab would be more cost effective for a level build surface. This is exactly the type of project I want to do in a year or so. I'm so glad you are documenting your process for us!
Yep at this scale I can't imagine that aluminum plate would be anywhere near flat. Granite is good for that purpose but the thermal properties might be less than ideal (a ton of thermal mass is gonna be very greedy for heat and take ages to heat up cool down)
A honeycomb core panel would be rigid and light, or a torsion box design could work. It really depends on how flat you need it to be for 3d printing, bed levelling works great for surface adhesion, and printing with a raft could be used to create a perfectly flat surface. Personally, I like prusa's new segmented heated bed solution, especially for large format printing.
I'm curious how well that lead screw will work. I'm wondering if all that bouncing is going to be visible as an artifact in the print. Either way, it will be super cool to see a print that large.
Yeah that bouncing is a good indication of why you go for larger diameters on longer lengths (or different systems altogether). That whip is baaad for quality (and everything else)
Larger ball screw would be much better but very costly. At least he can usr the cheap lead screw to get something functional before he remortgages the house, lol.
To solve the pellet feeding problem you could add a pellet sensor, an optical one since the tube is clear could work, and make a routine to park the extruder to a corner where you would install a big automated hopper. So when the level of pellets goes down, the extruder pauses the print, moves to the 'refill station', reloads and goes back to printing. The hopper would need a set volume to unload or another spiral screw to measure the right amount to refill.
This is the first video I watched from your channel. I am impressed with your teaching skills and that you obviously spent a lot of time editing the speaking part of your videos to make it flow fast and smooth. These are the signs of a great film-maker and editor. Looking forward to seeing how the rest of this project turns out!
Very interesting project. There's a lot of whip on the lead screws, you could do with a larger diameter of lead screw in order to resolve this. I'm not a fan of the bed levelling mechanism, it will be a lot of work to level and you'll likely find that you need to re-level it both periodically and every time you decided to change your bed temperature. I'd also be concerned about the level changing as the printed part's weight changes throughout the print. Mechanical levelling of a bed of this size is a losing battle. I'd suggest rigidly mounting the bed and relying on the Duet's mesh auto-levelling with auto-probing. You can do a periodic probe of all of the mesh points and the probe can also be used to set your z height with a single-point probe at the start of every print. The mesh auto-levelling will also correct for any tram that you have with the four z-axes.
Couple thoughts on your reasonable comment: Regarding the lead screw whip, the ideal case would be to use a 20mm ball screw at this length. I simply cannot afford to build a system around this component. There is a tensioning nut with thrust bearings on the actuator to remove some of the compression on the lead screw, but this will not eliminate the whip. I'm hoping that the whip is manageable at low enough speeds that I can get decent prints. I have used these same actuators in my CNC plasma table and the cuts were great: ua-cam.com/video/a-cyTMqul-o/v-deo.html (just 1 actuator though not 7). Finally, the stand that I quickly threw together for holding up that 1500mm c-beam rocked back and forth when the motor was accelerating. You can really see this on the b-roll shot that zooms into the motor. This may be why the lead screw whip looked worse on video then in reality. The bed leveling mechanism is intended for getting the bed close to level at 60C. The bed is a cut off from a 4x8 sheet so it didn't even come flat. There would have been a significant amount of Z-axis movement when printing a layer if I relied on mesh leveling alone. For higher temperatures, I will let mesh leveling compensate for changes in the build plate because as you pointed out, I am definitely not releveling the bed between PLA and ABS prints. At max compression, the springs can hold 13lbs. If I can get near that compression across all 25 springs, then the bed be able to support around 300lbs (evenly distributed). A 4'x4x'4' block of PLA at 100% infill would weigh thousands of lbs, so I definitely won't be able to use the entire volumetric capabilities of this printer with this configuration. But I do want to talk about this limitation and considerations that need to be made for removing a hundred pound part from the bed. However, the build plate can be rigid mounted as configured.
@@DrDFlo have you considered stabilising the leadscrews with a loosely fitting bearing on a mini carriage that slides around on the screw independent from the extruder. You can make it stay halfway between the extruder and the edge of the frame with some clever cabling trick (I can sketch it out if you want). That said, I'm not sure if it will damage the screw, but the way it's whipping can't be good either right?
I have only watched part of the video so far. Regarding lead screw flex. I am planning a 3 x 6 ft machine which was originally for 3d but has morphed into other tasks. The rotational speed of the shaft is length and diameter dependent. Leaving it to whip will destroy sooner than later everything connected to it. I was looking at 20 diam x 4mm pitch for the required accuracy. Going fatter is a loosing game because the acceleration power needed also increases. I thought of doing as 'csiz' suggested but either the bearing or the screw will wear. Heat gain in the system is also a problem. I am going to try a tooth belt as a track, not as a belt. The other reality is to ignore the 6 mt/ min type speeds. Is that really a necessary requirement? The traverse speed only needs to be something a little faster than the extrusion rate. Particularly with fixed tooling like this, traverse speed is only a small fraction of the total extrusion time, and the joy of saving a few seconds per build becomes a fools mission in my view. Returning to the heat buildup problem. With regular high speeds the screw will lengthen differently to the rest of the machine. Product accuracy becomes thrown out as time progresses. I am separating the drive from the measurement system to overcome this. Notwithstanding this, different coefficients of temperature are not to be ignored when shed temperatures can range over 40 /50 degrees C. (Australia) I will be watching the rest.
@@DrDFlo Why springs actually? How about the bed being supported by locknuts, maybe with washers, would that work? As to the whipping, i'm not terribly concerned? You can always have some sort of a sliding coupler on the moving part.
A few months ago, I was offered to tour of an aerospace company's R&D facility local to us. While I've worked with commercial printers both FDM and MSLA, Industrial printers were new to me. A few specs to blow your mind: the 'footprint' of one of their machines was 20x40 FEET (it's enclosed in its own room inside the main building with full environmental controls), operates from a control room where the printing head is mounted to a four axis gantry, uses a mammoth 30mm nozzle size as the Smallest offering, and can print anything that will fit via 5 gallon buckets at a time for pellet feed into a centralized hopper. The display piece was a CF-based main strut fixture for a wing, and even chopped up, still needed a forklift to move around. It impressed the hell out of me!
Great to see this kind of build. I work for a company that makes that kind of sized 3D printers (this is a bit bigger than our current largest XYZ offering), so I really understand the issues. It's also fun to see the different design decisions you've made versus what's present in our printers! Really shows you how there are multiple ways of solving things! Good luck with the rest of the assembly, and looking forward to see you tackle things going forward.
yes, the speed definetly is wrong - as they sad "motor can run 9kmm in minute". And I thing the belt is better sollution, belts can handle hunderds of kilograms (harley use it intead of chain and other implementation) and also belt finaly produce lower vibrations .
Loved this video. 3D printer enthusiast here, and I can't help wonder if 10 years from now, all mainstream printing will be from pellets or "cartridges" of pellets, rather than spools. Very cool that dies can also be added inline with the print process.
It looks to me like your listed speeds where off by a factor of 20. I'm very curious though, whether creating such a big printer is actually feasible. I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for the next video 🙂
I have never seen your channel before but the quality of this video, content, production, pacing, was incredible, true passion caught on film. Congratulations to you for your hard work and significant effort on the channel and series.
Please note the shape of the bottom of the nozzle is crucial for getting a proper line with a flat top when printing. Just drilling a larger hole will reduce that flat area around the whole and it will limit the maximum thickness of the printed line and will make it more difficult to get a nice flat top. Molten filament should be constrained from both the top and the bottom when printed.
They make fan style through beam probes for vacuuming pulling up pellets in industrial molding applications. Most people use a centrifugal dust extraction hat on a small shop vac to feed the pellets. You should be able to set up a control scheme in either the duet or via a pi for the vacuum on. Try not to step on the bed like that. You definitely put some bow in it after than. The spring loaded beds look like a good idea. But they often minimize a bent sheet that is exaggerated when it heats up. The best way to adjust those screws is with mesh leveling in the duet firmware. You can set your grid to be somewhere close to the screw head and it'll tell you the offset compared to the z zero. I know ABL is a bit silly with all that adjustment. But on my cubic meter build the able with independent z axis motors was pretty awesome. Setup took some time, but the control scheme was incredible. Currently make an idex machine running that reprap firmware and it reminded me how awesome it was for my giant machine too.
13:05 Hey Dr. D-flo. Leadscrews (and ball screws), and any general shaft have a critical speed that decreases by the inverse of the square of the length. And after that, it will start to resonate. Assuming you have a 4 thread 2 mm pitch screw of 1500 mm in length and 8 mm diameter, and that your screw is supported at both ends (instead of fixed) your critical speed might be around 172 and 344 rpm (with a safety factor between 2.5 and 1.25 respectively). In this demonstration you mention that the actuator can go around 8000 mm/min, which translates into 1000 rpm with the given pitch. Therefore, you're above the critical speed, which explains why your leadscrew is vibrating that much
Have you contemplated how this large of a bed will react when heated? I think you will find, that it will bow like nobody's business. Maybe you could use meshed leveling to compensate? Also are you segmenting the bed in several heatzone? If not I think you will have a crazy power consumption even when printing "smaller" objects. Looking much forward to follow you progress in this endeavor.
The plan is to throw the kitchen sink at the bed leveling problem. I have the springs for making large adjustments, the gantry will sit on universal ball joints allowing for quad gantry leveling, and finally mesh leveling. Regarding power consumption, I am only going to use this printer for massive prints or many nested parts so personally, the zoned heating is not worth the extra wiring. But I can definitely see an application where you would want to run this printer with such a setup.
@@RobertSzasz That's a great idea. Use the plasma table to cut some flexures around each of the mounting holes that allow XY movement but not much Z movement.
@@smellycat249 dunno if you realized this, but that's entirely the point behind crowd sourced construction - everyone contributes, builds, and iterates, and at the end of the line you have something awesome
You’re a wizard. Fantastic video with amazing clear commentary. This is way beyond my capability but is presented in a way that makes it incredibly interesting.
What an amazing project! I was surprised to scroll down and see only 77k; this is the material and production quality you'd expect from a channel with several million subs, and with content like this, I'm sure you'll be there before too long. Great video, cheers
Good recommendation UA-cam algorythmn. Looking forward to the next bits of this; It's gonna be a crazy printer. Imagine printing full-size chairs on this...
Looking forward to seeing the rest of the series... From the first time I saw a home built printer, I have had a dream of a cubic meter print area. Last year I saw 3 different channels work on something close. I finally got my first printer this year...
its hard to imagine how strong ABS parts would be extruded so thick. I can tell a difference when printing the same parts with a .4mm and .8mm nozzles. Something like this opens so many possibilites
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You don't even need the nozzle, printing with thicker extrusion works fine to about 200% of the nozzle size.
I probably should read more comments to see if the subject has been broached? First, great project. I've had the extruder idea in my head for some time because? As a kid, I worked in both injection molding and extrusion blow molding (about a hundred years ago). Anyhow, one point of focus, for the extruder and feeding it. Pelletized plastic takes on more moisture than filament. You want a dryer on your hopper and you can locate your hopper (think 10lbs, 100lbs) on the other side of your shop if you want. Set up the dryer on the hopper. Run a vaccum tube from the hopper/dryer to the extruder. You can setup your feed system to run automatically to keep your feed tube full. With that in mind I'd look at say a one or two pound? Three? Think volume and how often your feed will have to kick on. A sizeable mini hopper on top of the extruder. This will allow you to keep your plastic dry and feed your extruder without having to constantly be involved. Also it will allow you to do your color blends on your pellets in larger batches which will allow you to get a consistent blend accross prints. That's my two cents. Hopper/Dryer/Feed. Any moisture will become quickly apparent, more so in large formatting extrusion volume. LOOKING FORWARD TO SEEING MORE!
You mentioned buying a custom bed heater. There used to be a thing in catering that was used to keep a trey of food hot which consisted of a frame with a glass plate made out of mirror that had the silver layer partially removed in a rather maze like spiral pattern. This can be done rather easily by removing some of the epoxy coat with a diode laser, then washing with muriatic acid. Power it with wall current switched with an scr, and otherwise control it like any other bed heater. The acid is commonly used to bleach concrete and as a pool chemical. Home depot sells 2 gallons for around $20.
You get a subscription and a comment just because of your cute helper...And the fact that i love your channel and the size and the amazing planning of your projects. :D Besides that i love that you make a timeframe of your video making it way easier to go back and find one fact amongst the many fact you present during a video. I simply love i.
great video! I reminds me of This Old House. Its great when it starts I have boundless enthusiasm for make a giant 3d printer. then after watching for a while I realize this project is beyond my resources lol.
Of course! My goal is to have the workflow for setting up a print on this massive machine to be the same as one of the Voron’s that I built (Automatic bed leveling, nozzle probes, etc). Should hopefully just be a longer wait time for everything to come to temperature.
For the 5mm nozzle that you drilled out, I feel like you should flatten off the face so that the edges aren't so pointy. Most nozzles have that flat area around the orifice, and I think it helps with print quality.
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100% this, I think I tried a bored out nozzle at one point and it was awful. You really need that flat area.
13:45 at 6000mm/sec (22 Kph!) , the gantry would have made it through the wall on the other other side of the garage... perhaps you meant to say 600mm/s?
I worked in the plastics industry for about 15 years (Primarily in blow molding and Injection Molding) the best way to do the supply (if you have the headroom is to use a vacuum based hopper system, Noise might be an issue though, I only know industrial applications, so might not be good for you. The biggest issue with pellet based extruders is cleanup. If you need to change colors you'd have to take the screw and barrel apart and clean everything to get all the old color out of it. I dealt with screws and barrels 3-12 ft long and hot (not fun), to clean them and the dies to change color or material. BTW your screw needs to be removed and everything cleaned while hot you you need some major heavy gloves. Found a UA-cam link showing what I mean, these were about the scale I've dealt with in my past, be glad you got a little screw. Not trying to scare you just showing you what might be needed when the time comes for actually making things. ua-cam.com/video/67nxFiXOrhc/v-deo.html&ab_channel=LearnIndustrialMACHINES%26AUTOMATION
My covid project was to build a 4 x 5 x6 foot printer. I turns out to be very similar to yours. The heated bed has been a problem. I have used a donated 2x3 foot 240 volt 2160 watt single silicon heating pad on a 8 mm aluminum plate ( Not thick enough ). It heats great but because it is a single pad I am unable ( I think ) to pierce it to mount adjusting bolts and springs near the center. Unsupported it bows in the middle. Mesh compensation helps a little but to date I have only been able to utilize about half the bed. It has been a fascinating learning experience, since I had none, but it has definitely been worthwhile. Particularly the learning g code part (argh) !!! Very cool video and looking forward to your next.
Bring that water level up. We cut with the bottom of the sheet touching and get zero dross. We do submerged for really long cuts. Your THC, speed and voltage settings play a much bigger part.
Cool build! A heated chamber would be a very interesting follow-up once the main assembly is done. As far as pellet feeding goes, I once saw a pellet extruder system that used a vacuum (like a shop vac) to draw pellets from a bin into the hopper through a flexy hose. It ran only at intervals, and I'm not sure how it was controlled -- maybe with a breakbeam across the hopper to tell when the pellets ran low?
Pretty much. In blow molding, you'd usually have an industrial vacuum motor on the hopper on top of the extruder gantry sucking up pellets from below. IR beams were, and likely still are, typical fill sensors. The extruder screws I've seen were able 3-4 meters long with heating bands and thermocouples around the barrel.
nice video, tip for adding color, I had a small factory for making small decorations and had a blow moulding machine and we used a color powder that we put with the pallets in a big mixer before adding it to the extruder. and with a big nozzle like that you can even add glitters.
You should probably opt for rack & pinion for your linear motion on such a large format machine. Or go for a thicker lead screw. There's a lot of whip in that leadscrew when even trying to move the print head slowly. Also, regarding the build plate, did you get cast aluminum? I've heard that that's important to make sure the plate doesn't warp at different temperatures.
You could always use a level sensor on the feeder tube and hook it up to an air venturi loader system. This is very similar to how virgin resin is loaded in plastic injection molding systems.
them some nice toys you have there great use of them keep up the good work How much current are you figuring you will draw and if this works can we do bellows and heat the chamber....how many subs to heat the chamber
as far as getting more pellets through the extruder, if you make an ooze block off to the side it can like plot a square where it stirs a flexible tube from underneath with that funnel that makes some more go in
Please upload next video I honestly cannot wait any longer! Really though, thanks for the content. I am very interested to see how this turns out, and may even build one myself if it goes well.
Triangulate your frame for rigidity might help accuracy. You may also consider a less thermally reactive composite, try filling the extrusion with and epoxy garnet slurry.
I gotta think that despite the disadvantage of having to purge a huge amount of material before getting your colored plastic running... It can't be too hard to grind up the purged plastic and mix it in with some fresh pellets. Big advantage to direct pellet extrusion IMO.
6:03 hopper at ground level with an auger pushing pellets up to flexible pipe depositing into a funnel (as you had to file the clear tube) attached to extruder. So that the heavy stuff is at ground level and the funnel and flexible pipe can move freely. The auger can control pellets to minimize the ooze etc.
You might have heard of Extrudinaire, they're gearing up to release an affordable pellet extruder which will retract, and according to their demos, it may retract spectacularly well. It's also super lightweight, so it can be belt driven no problem. However it's only rated up to about 300g per hour. It's intended to be used with an external continuous feed system so it would work with commodity motion systems. I suppose just drilling out the nozzle like you did isn't quite enough, as the slicer expects the bead to be ironed flat, against the swelling that can occur right after the filament leaves the nozzle as the plastic molecules unfurl; but sanding a little flat on the nozzle should do it.
Great project. Maybe a BLtouch + mesh bed leveling will save you some pain.. Also adding X braces to link the vertical pillars would make a big change on the lateral stiffness of the frame. Looking forward seeing how this beast prints !
An internal valve like a ball valve that won’t change in internal volume would be perfect right before the nozzle to prevent leakage. Not sure how that would be done though. For the bed, what about small steppers with screws and a nut to adjust the bed? You could move over the nozzle or sensor over a stepper under the bed and extend until it touches the sensor? The whole bed would have to be allowed to flex a bit. Maybe a 5x5 grid of “bed jacks”?
Even tho it sounds crazy.. But for the bed you are better off using a solid steel plate with one inch or more. Yes it will be hard to heat but if you consider that you print for a long time the energy expense is alright. Also you would have a way more stable temp. Another benefit is the added weight to the machine lowering resonance. Oh and also the bed will not bow like shot
You could add colorant to the pellets and 3d print in color! Its totally worth it if you intend to print that big. Then I saw that in the video. Great job.
For the lead screw, what about some 3d printed spacers with bronze bushings? The spacers could slide within the channel. Allow the print head to push them side to side, but have them return to the middle of the empty space with something like a constant force spring (tape measure thing) and a stop pin?
To prevent having to have a large bin above the printer, you should mount a cyclone dust collector above the printer with a flexible hose to a shop vac. Then when you need to add pellets you can turn on the shop vac and vacuum up some at a lower height. You could add a pressure switch in the tube to automate turning on the vacuum.
I greatly admire your talent and knowledge. Greetings from Medellin Colombia. You think that by following your project repository step by step I am capable of making a machine like yours. I want to start. thank you
Have some minor experience with injection molding. They use a screw also but it move in and out of the barrel slightly to do retraction. The other thing is that the molds have gates in them to shut off the flow of plastic.What about making a gated nozzle. My other million dollar idea was a gated nozzle with a wide thin orifice for printing wide walls. The nozzle would have to rotate to make turns but I think it's something to look at.
1. This is awesome, and I can't wait to see the finished result! 2. I'm surprised at how the actuators sounded... Kind of want to sample it on a song later
I don't think your bed leveling idea is going to work the way you think. You are basically relying on the springs to push the bed flat. More than likely though, the springs are not going to be strong enough and a downward warp in the plate is just going to compress the spring and the screw head will stick up. What you need is a threaded stud rigidly bolted to the bed that then passes through the aluminum block you made with a jam nut on each side. Then you can pull/push the bed flat as needed and it would be locked in place by both jam nuts tightened against the aluminum block.
If you're concerned about leadscrew whip, it may be worth looking into hollow shaft steppers or belt driving the leadnut instead of spinning the leadscrew.
We actually build a printer like this at work with this same extruder. Massive Dimensions makes an automatic feeder system for this system. I only have one question, which wire did you use to get the fans to power up? We've been working around it for a while. Also it will move faster than that.... :)
For a noisch leveled bed you could go Prusa's new way of putting more single beds together to one big. So the bed is less likely to warp via heat if you put the right engineered base under it. Also at this size it's probably mich easier to have the bed stationary and the XY-gantry moving up and down. The bed then can be pushed upwards by screws from underneath and be leveled this way. So you could use as many screws as you liked. Also your ground base then could be wood or so with the screws in it.
Have a look at CNC waterjet technology for a feed solution isolated away from the head. I haven’t finished your video yet so don’t know at what rate you’re going to need raw material feed. However to get rid or reduce the amount of scrap extrusion when changing materials you will need a smaller container at the head and most of the material kept at a larger hopper elsewhere which is automatically and pneumatically activated by the use of limit or proximity switches on the container at the head. Try increasing the heat at the large hopper. I have a gut feeling it will speed up the melting and consequently the extrusion. Just a suggestion
For a stable precise bed. Buy yourself a second hand pool table. The 18mm or 20mm slate bed is CNC milled it’s intended use as a pool table. Even the cheap ones are pretty good. Just make sure that the pool table bed doesn’t have dips. I found the older the table the less likely it will have dips in it. For one mass manufacturing now is not as scrutinised as it used to be for two I doubt a bad table will survive the frustrations of any pool player for too long. Also slate is stone so once heated it retains steady heat throughout very well due to the organic composition of slate. By insulating the bed (wool+styrofoam) the slate will keep a constant heat and you will not need as much energy to maintain that constant heat even if there is a power failure (many homes have heated stone floors also traditional Teppanyaki uses small granite slabs heated from below by a small flame because it allows the meat to cook slowly over a prolonged period of time with minimal energy expenditure). Only catch with this is: will your structure and motors cope with the weight of the slate bed plus the aluminium frame attached to the bed and to axis movers which will weigh around 60-70kg/m2 for the slate plus however many Lmeters of aluminium used. It’s important to note again I mention structure (fittings and anything that makes up the structure) and motors (that’s the motor itself as well as the gears etc) should be able to handle the weight.
Hi excellent video, just something to consider is the weight of a large 3D printed part, maybe you will need to get stiffer springs for that so you don't lose your table alignment
Just an idea, you could use that extruder to feed a second more conventional style extruder with a 4 or 5 mm nozzle which you could control the flowrate more precisely when printing.
That was my first thought as well but then I realized that this would then run into the limitations of a filament extruder when it comes to overall flow rate. The filament being preheated would probably help with that somewhat but thermal management would be really difficult if the material is going to be close to the glass transition point and I can imagine the second extruder just becoming encased in a giant blob of preheated, oozing filament.
I don't think those springs are sufficient. A printer like this is meant to print objects weighing multiple kilograms, and the extra compression resulting from the extra weight of an in-progress print would throw out your vertical tolerances.
CNC Mill upgrades, SLS 3D printing, building 3 Vorons, and exploring some of my favorite projects to make in my garage - 2021 was a content packed year! As I move onto larger projects, I will stay true to my style of dissecting all elements of the machines and products that I am building. I will catch you guys in 2022 🎉
I think the velocity of the head is wrong on the video as 3000mm/s would be 3 meters per second.
first video I've ever seen on your channel. I'm 300+ lbs. Do you think you could print me some chairs and what would you charge? 2:20 do you experience feedstock binding?
Sorry if I missed it, but do you address racking (tilting) and twisting of the frame as the extruder moves?
Hey so was wondering if you could blend down bottles and throw them in rather than pellets
se podrá usar material reusado como soportes o impresiones fallidas
At this scale I'm imagining a granite slab would be more cost effective for a level build surface. This is exactly the type of project I want to do in a year or so. I'm so glad you are documenting your process for us!
Yep at this scale I can't imagine that aluminum plate would be anywhere near flat. Granite is good for that purpose but the thermal properties might be less than ideal (a ton of thermal mass is gonna be very greedy for heat and take ages to heat up cool down)
Like marble rocks don't heat up. A slab of marble seems like a radioactive air conditioner .
A honeycomb core panel would be rigid and light, or a torsion box design could work.
It really depends on how flat you need it to be for 3d printing, bed levelling works great for surface adhesion, and printing with a raft could be used to create a perfectly flat surface.
Personally, I like prusa's new segmented heated bed solution, especially for large format printing.
I'd go for routing the surface then adding nichrome ribbons and an fr4 plate on top.
It was only at 16:30 that I realized the sheer size of this build. Absolutely insane, can't wait to see the rest of it!
I'm curious how well that lead screw will work. I'm wondering if all that bouncing is going to be visible as an artifact in the print. Either way, it will be super cool to see a print that large.
^ This is why Rack and Pinion are generally preferred on large range of motion linear actuators where rigidity rules out belts.
Yeah that bouncing is a good indication of why you go for larger diameters on longer lengths (or different systems altogether). That whip is baaad for quality (and everything else)
Larger ball screw would be much better but very costly. At least he can usr the cheap lead screw to get something functional before he remortgages the house, lol.
It’ll be fine
it should be okay, the vslot/rollers holds it very still to the x gantry, idk about the exactness of x movement though
To solve the pellet feeding problem you could add a pellet sensor, an optical one since the tube is clear could work, and make a routine to park the extruder to a corner where you would install a big automated hopper. So when the level of pellets goes down, the extruder pauses the print, moves to the 'refill station', reloads and goes back to printing. The hopper would need a set volume to unload or another spiral screw to measure the right amount to refill.
This is the first video I watched from your channel. I am impressed with your teaching skills and that you obviously spent a lot of time editing the speaking part of your videos to make it flow fast and smooth. These are the signs of a great film-maker and editor. Looking forward to seeing how the rest of this project turns out!
Very interesting project.
There's a lot of whip on the lead screws, you could do with a larger diameter of lead screw in order to resolve this.
I'm not a fan of the bed levelling mechanism, it will be a lot of work to level and you'll likely find that you need to re-level it both periodically and every time you decided to change your bed temperature. I'd also be concerned about the level changing as the printed part's weight changes throughout the print.
Mechanical levelling of a bed of this size is a losing battle. I'd suggest rigidly mounting the bed and relying on the Duet's mesh auto-levelling with auto-probing. You can do a periodic probe of all of the mesh points and the probe can also be used to set your z height with a single-point probe at the start of every print. The mesh auto-levelling will also correct for any tram that you have with the four z-axes.
Couple thoughts on your reasonable comment:
Regarding the lead screw whip, the ideal case would be to use a 20mm ball screw at this length. I simply cannot afford to build a system around this component. There is a tensioning nut with thrust bearings on the actuator to remove some of the compression on the lead screw, but this will not eliminate the whip. I'm hoping that the whip is manageable at low enough speeds that I can get decent prints. I have used these same actuators in my CNC plasma table and the cuts were great: ua-cam.com/video/a-cyTMqul-o/v-deo.html (just 1 actuator though not 7). Finally, the stand that I quickly threw together for holding up that 1500mm c-beam rocked back and forth when the motor was accelerating. You can really see this on the b-roll shot that zooms into the motor. This may be why the lead screw whip looked worse on video then in reality.
The bed leveling mechanism is intended for getting the bed close to level at 60C. The bed is a cut off from a 4x8 sheet so it didn't even come flat. There would have been a significant amount of Z-axis movement when printing a layer if I relied on mesh leveling alone. For higher temperatures, I will let mesh leveling compensate for changes in the build plate because as you pointed out, I am definitely not releveling the bed between PLA and ABS prints.
At max compression, the springs can hold 13lbs. If I can get near that compression across all 25 springs, then the bed be able to support around 300lbs (evenly distributed). A 4'x4x'4' block of PLA at 100% infill would weigh thousands of lbs, so I definitely won't be able to use the entire volumetric capabilities of this printer with this configuration. But I do want to talk about this limitation and considerations that need to be made for removing a hundred pound part from the bed. However, the build plate can be rigid mounted as configured.
@@DrDFlo have you considered stabilising the leadscrews with a loosely fitting bearing on a mini carriage that slides around on the screw independent from the extruder. You can make it stay halfway between the extruder and the edge of the frame with some clever cabling trick (I can sketch it out if you want). That said, I'm not sure if it will damage the screw, but the way it's whipping can't be good either right?
I have only watched part of the video so far.
Regarding lead screw flex. I am planning a 3 x 6 ft machine which was originally for 3d but has morphed into other tasks. The rotational speed of the shaft is length and diameter dependent. Leaving it to whip will destroy sooner than later everything connected to it. I was looking at 20 diam x 4mm pitch for the required accuracy. Going fatter is a loosing game because the acceleration power needed also increases. I thought of doing as 'csiz' suggested but either the bearing or the screw will wear. Heat gain in the system is also a problem. I am going to try a tooth belt as a track, not as a belt.
The other reality is to ignore the 6 mt/ min type speeds. Is that really a necessary requirement? The traverse speed only needs to be something a little faster than the extrusion rate. Particularly with fixed tooling like this, traverse speed is only a small fraction of the total extrusion time, and the joy of saving a few seconds per build becomes a fools mission in my view.
Returning to the heat buildup problem. With regular high speeds the screw will lengthen differently to the rest of the machine. Product accuracy becomes thrown out as time progresses. I am separating the drive from the measurement system to overcome this. Notwithstanding this, different coefficients of temperature are not to be ignored when shed temperatures can range over 40 /50 degrees C. (Australia)
I will be watching the rest.
@@DrDFlo Why springs actually? How about the bed being supported by locknuts, maybe with washers, would that work?
As to the whipping, i'm not terribly concerned? You can always have some sort of a sliding coupler on the moving part.
Just wanted to say a compliment to the girl who helps you. She is really nice. Cherish her.
Can’t let a nice Andi comment go by unnoticed… She is awesome! Love her to death.
A few months ago, I was offered to tour of an aerospace company's R&D facility local to us. While I've worked with commercial printers both FDM and MSLA, Industrial printers were new to me. A few specs to blow your mind: the 'footprint' of one of their machines was 20x40 FEET (it's enclosed in its own room inside the main building with full environmental controls), operates from a control room where the printing head is mounted to a four axis gantry, uses a mammoth 30mm nozzle size as the Smallest offering, and can print anything that will fit via 5 gallon buckets at a time for pellet feed into a centralized hopper. The display piece was a CF-based main strut fixture for a wing, and even chopped up, still needed a forklift to move around. It impressed the hell out of me!
Great to see this kind of build. I work for a company that makes that kind of sized 3D printers (this is a bit bigger than our current largest XYZ offering), so I really understand the issues. It's also fun to see the different design decisions you've made versus what's present in our printers! Really shows you how there are multiple ways of solving things! Good luck with the rest of the assembly, and looking forward to see you tackle things going forward.
Company name? I'm interested in buying a big printer?
@@Bino-zm9bl Modix3D
@@lazarjovic9948 thanks one of the models looks like what I'm looking for
3000 mm/sec (which is 3 meters per second) looks incorrect, maybe 3000mm/min?
This is beyond any of my dreams of building something large.... Incredible work and patience
The ultimate 'hold my beer' of 3D printers, cannot wait to see how this goes!
13:40 I think you got something wrong with the speeds, this doesn't look like 6m/s
Awsome Video like always.
Should have been mm/minute, not second.
yes, the speed definetly is wrong - as they sad "motor can run 9kmm in minute". And I thing the belt is better sollution, belts can handle hunderds of kilograms (harley use it intead of chain and other implementation) and also belt finaly produce lower vibrations .
30mm/s Maybe? Or 3000mm/min.?
6000 mm/min is correct
Loved this video. 3D printer enthusiast here, and I can't help wonder if 10 years from now, all mainstream printing will be from pellets or "cartridges" of pellets, rather than spools.
Very cool that dies can also be added inline with the print process.
It looks to me like your listed speeds where off by a factor of 20. I'm very curious though, whether creating such a big printer is actually feasible. I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for the next video 🙂
I have never seen your channel before but the quality of this video, content, production, pacing, was incredible, true passion caught on film. Congratulations to you for your hard work and significant effort on the channel and series.
I thought I wouldnt watch this to the end but your presentation was really great. I really enjoyed this video and subscribed right away!
Please note the shape of the bottom of the nozzle is crucial for getting a proper line with a flat top when printing. Just drilling a larger hole will reduce that flat area around the whole and it will limit the maximum thickness of the printed line and will make it more difficult to get a nice flat top. Molten filament should be constrained from both the top and the bottom when printed.
They make fan style through beam probes for vacuuming pulling up pellets in industrial molding applications.
Most people use a centrifugal dust extraction hat on a small shop vac to feed the pellets. You should be able to set up a control scheme in either the duet or via a pi for the vacuum on.
Try not to step on the bed like that. You definitely put some bow in it after than. The spring loaded beds look like a good idea. But they often minimize a bent sheet that is exaggerated when it heats up. The best way to adjust those screws is with mesh leveling in the duet firmware. You can set your grid to be somewhere close to the screw head and it'll tell you the offset compared to the z zero.
I know ABL is a bit silly with all that adjustment. But on my cubic meter build the able with independent z axis motors was pretty awesome. Setup took some time, but the control scheme was incredible.
Currently make an idex machine running that reprap firmware and it reminded me how awesome it was for my giant machine too.
13:05 Hey Dr. D-flo.
Leadscrews (and ball screws), and any general shaft have a critical speed that decreases by the inverse of the square of the length. And after that, it will start to resonate. Assuming you have a 4 thread 2 mm pitch screw of 1500 mm in length and 8 mm diameter, and that your screw is supported at both ends (instead of fixed) your critical speed might be around 172 and 344 rpm (with a safety factor between 2.5 and 1.25 respectively).
In this demonstration you mention that the actuator can go around 8000 mm/min, which translates into 1000 rpm with the given pitch. Therefore, you're above the critical speed, which explains why your leadscrew is vibrating that much
Have you contemplated how this large of a bed will react when heated? I think you will find, that it will bow like nobody's business. Maybe you could use meshed leveling to compensate? Also are you segmenting the bed in several heatzone? If not I think you will have a crazy power consumption even when printing "smaller" objects. Looking much forward to follow you progress in this endeavor.
The plan is to throw the kitchen sink at the bed leveling problem. I have the springs for making large adjustments, the gantry will sit on universal ball joints allowing for quad gantry leveling, and finally mesh leveling.
Regarding power consumption, I am only going to use this printer for massive prints or many nested parts so personally, the zoned heating is not worth the extra wiring. But I can definitely see an application where you would want to run this printer with such a setup.
@@DrDFlo flexures as single axis constraints? Allowing the bed to expand and contact but not bow?
@@RobertSzasz That's a great idea. Use the plasma table to cut some flexures around each of the mounting holes that allow XY movement but not much Z movement.
Good job copying prusa
@@smellycat249 dunno if you realized this, but that's entirely the point behind crowd sourced construction - everyone contributes, builds, and iterates, and at the end of the line you have something awesome
You’re a wizard. Fantastic video with amazing clear commentary. This is way beyond my capability but is presented in a way that makes it incredibly interesting.
man, you should make a shop tour if you'd look to your vids it must be one of the coolest shops on youtube
Pretty cool project!
Love the size of the printer!
You should try this and print large versions of your stuff, we would love this
What an amazing project! I was surprised to scroll down and see only 77k; this is the material and production quality you'd expect from a channel with several million subs, and with content like this, I'm sure you'll be there before too long. Great video, cheers
"mixing can't be understated" // in injection molding, most of the heat is generated by the screw+friction, not just a barrel heater for this reason.
Oh! I am now on the edge of my seat waiting to see more! good job man!
How about building one of yours this big ;)
@@haenselundgretel654 Don't give me ideas! I already have enough "started / on going / unfishished / would like to " projects as it is right now! :)
@@MirageC dito...
Habe a good one and enjoy!
Your corner pieces make me happy.
Good recommendation UA-cam algorythmn. Looking forward to the next bits of this; It's gonna be a crazy printer. Imagine printing full-size chairs on this...
Looking forward to seeing the rest of the series... From the first time I saw a home built printer, I have had a dream of a cubic meter print area. Last year I saw 3 different channels work on something close. I finally got my first printer this year...
Man, that CNC is gorgeous.. I just subbed, but it looks like I need to go back into your older videos and binge watch! Beautiful work!!
its hard to imagine how strong ABS parts would be extruded so thick. I can tell a difference when printing the same parts with a .4mm and .8mm nozzles. Something like this opens so many possibilites
You don't even need the nozzle, printing with thicker extrusion works fine to about 200% of the nozzle size.
I probably should read more comments to see if the subject has been broached? First, great project. I've had the extruder idea in my head for some time because? As a kid, I worked in both injection molding and extrusion blow molding (about a hundred years ago). Anyhow, one point of focus, for the extruder and feeding it. Pelletized plastic takes on more moisture than filament. You want a dryer on your hopper and you can locate your hopper (think 10lbs, 100lbs) on the other side of your shop if you want. Set up the dryer on the hopper. Run a vaccum tube from the hopper/dryer to the extruder. You can setup your feed system to run automatically to keep your feed tube full. With that in mind I'd look at say a one or two pound? Three? Think volume and how often your feed will have to kick on. A sizeable mini hopper on top of the extruder. This will allow you to keep your plastic dry and feed your extruder without having to constantly be involved. Also it will allow you to do your color blends on your pellets in larger batches which will allow you to get a consistent blend accross prints. That's my two cents. Hopper/Dryer/Feed. Any moisture will become quickly apparent, more so in large formatting extrusion volume. LOOKING FORWARD TO SEEING MORE!
I loved every minute of this video. Can't wait to see the next installment and all the things you'll print!
Ah yes, the this old tony way of cutting stock down for the spring holders. Perfection every time.
You mentioned buying a custom bed heater. There used to be a thing in catering that was used to keep a trey of food hot which consisted of a frame with a glass plate made out of mirror that had the silver layer partially removed in a rather maze like spiral pattern. This can be done rather easily by removing some of the epoxy coat with a diode laser, then washing with muriatic acid. Power it with wall current switched with an scr, and otherwise control it like any other bed heater. The acid is commonly used to bleach concrete and as a pool chemical. Home depot sells 2 gallons for around $20.
You get a subscription and a comment just because of your cute helper...And the fact that i love your channel and the size and the amazing planning of your projects. :D
Besides that i love that you make a timeframe of your video making it way easier to go back and find one fact amongst the many fact you present during a video. I simply love i.
Most interesting and informative FDM printer video I've seen all year.
great video! I reminds me of This Old House. Its great when it starts I have boundless enthusiasm for make a giant 3d printer. then after watching for a while I realize this project is beyond my resources lol.
Love this build, Please, Please, have a video going over costs, time, and workflow for setting up a print!
Of course! My goal is to have the workflow for setting up a print on this massive machine to be the same as one of the Voron’s that I built (Automatic bed leveling, nozzle probes, etc). Should hopefully just be a longer wait time for everything to come to temperature.
For the 5mm nozzle that you drilled out, I feel like you should flatten off the face so that the edges aren't so pointy. Most nozzles have that flat area around the orifice, and I think it helps with print quality.
100% this, I think I tried a bored out nozzle at one point and it was awful. You really need that flat area.
for sure
Omg congratulation flo this is so clean!
HEYLL YEAH! Love big machines that print big stuff and can’t wait to see how the build progresses!
Thank you, I was going to add one to a belt printer but there wasn't that many examples builds. Thank you.
13:45 at 6000mm/sec (22 Kph!) , the gantry would have made it through the wall on the other other side of the garage... perhaps you meant to say 600mm/s?
I worked in the plastics industry for about 15 years (Primarily in blow molding and Injection Molding) the best way to do the supply (if you have the headroom is to use a vacuum based hopper system, Noise might be an issue though, I only know industrial applications, so might not be good for you. The biggest issue with pellet based extruders is cleanup. If you need to change colors you'd have to take the screw and barrel apart and clean everything to get all the old color out of it. I dealt with screws and barrels 3-12 ft long and hot (not fun), to clean them and the dies to change color or material. BTW your screw needs to be removed and everything cleaned while hot you you need some major heavy gloves. Found a UA-cam link showing what I mean, these were about the scale I've dealt with in my past, be glad you got a little screw. Not trying to scare you just showing you what might be needed when the time comes for actually making things.
ua-cam.com/video/67nxFiXOrhc/v-deo.html&ab_channel=LearnIndustrialMACHINES%26AUTOMATION
Will be there for 2022! Hopefully we can meet up again sometime soon - miss you man
Thanks man! Look forward to catching up with you soon.
You are very good at explaining things.
The runout on that acme screw is insane
Very cool build! Pretty sweet to have the CNC laser and mill contributing as well. Thanks for the update.
My covid project was to build a 4 x 5 x6 foot printer. I turns out to be very similar to yours. The heated bed has been a problem. I have used a donated 2x3 foot 240 volt 2160 watt single silicon heating pad on a 8 mm aluminum plate ( Not thick enough ). It heats great but because it is a single pad I am unable ( I think ) to pierce it to mount adjusting bolts and springs near the center. Unsupported it bows in the middle. Mesh compensation helps a little but to date I have only been able to utilize about half the bed.
It has been a fascinating learning experience, since I had none, but it has definitely been worthwhile. Particularly the learning g code part (argh) !!!
Very cool video and looking forward to your next.
Bring that water level up. We cut with the bottom of the sheet touching and get zero dross. We do submerged for really long cuts. Your THC, speed and voltage settings play a much bigger part.
Great stuff! Looking forward to the rest of the build
This is really cool. Can't wait to see how it turns out and what you print on it.
Cool build! A heated chamber would be a very interesting follow-up once the main assembly is done. As far as pellet feeding goes, I once saw a pellet extruder system that used a vacuum (like a shop vac) to draw pellets from a bin into the hopper through a flexy hose. It ran only at intervals, and I'm not sure how it was controlled -- maybe with a breakbeam across the hopper to tell when the pellets ran low?
Pretty much. In blow molding, you'd usually have an industrial vacuum motor on the hopper on top of the extruder gantry sucking up pellets from below. IR beams were, and likely still are, typical fill sensors. The extruder screws I've seen were able 3-4 meters long with heating bands and thermocouples around the barrel.
@@onecalledchuck1664 Neat, thank you!
@@jamespray You're welcome!
Can’t love this enough.. so awesome.. level your bed on a crazy level.. can’t wait to see you next parts..
Hole project supper cool! But marking that small part on the cnc mill u have is bad ass !!! Lot of knowledge u got there keep it up !!!
nice video, tip for adding color, I had a small factory for making small decorations and had a blow moulding machine and we used a color powder that we put with the pallets in a big mixer before adding it to the extruder. and with a big nozzle like that you can even add glitters.
You should probably opt for rack & pinion for your linear motion on such a large format machine. Or go for a thicker lead screw. There's a lot of whip in that leadscrew when even trying to move the print head slowly.
Also, regarding the build plate, did you get cast aluminum? I've heard that that's important to make sure the plate doesn't warp at different temperatures.
Oh gawd, that leadscrew wobble!! I'd recommend a rack and pinion system with motors driving it on the carriage itself. Like the Avid CNC machines.
You could always use a level sensor on the feeder tube and hook it up to an air venturi loader system. This is very similar to how virgin resin is loaded in plastic injection molding systems.
them some nice toys you have there great use of them keep up the good work
How much current are you figuring you will draw and if this works can we do bellows and heat the chamber....how many subs to heat the chamber
finally a large format build that doesn't induce a gag reflex. 👍
Looking forward to watching the progress on this build!
as far as getting more pellets through the extruder, if you make an ooze block off to the side it can like plot a square where it stirs a flexible tube from underneath with that funnel that makes some more go in
Please upload next video I honestly cannot wait any longer! Really though, thanks for the content. I am very interested to see how this turns out, and may even build one myself if it goes well.
Triangulate your frame for rigidity might help accuracy. You may also consider a less thermally reactive composite, try filling the extrusion with and epoxy garnet slurry.
OOOF I bet Ivan Miranda is so jealous right about now
I gotta think that despite the disadvantage of having to purge a huge amount of material before getting your colored plastic running... It can't be too hard to grind up the purged plastic and mix it in with some fresh pellets.
Big advantage to direct pellet extrusion IMO.
6:03 hopper at ground level with an auger pushing pellets up to flexible pipe depositing into a funnel (as you had to file the clear tube) attached to extruder. So that the heavy stuff is at ground level and the funnel and flexible pipe can move freely. The auger can control pellets to minimize the ooze etc.
You might have heard of Extrudinaire, they're gearing up to release an affordable pellet extruder which will retract, and according to their demos, it may retract spectacularly well. It's also super lightweight, so it can be belt driven no problem. However it's only rated up to about 300g per hour. It's intended to be used with an external continuous feed system so it would work with commodity motion systems.
I suppose just drilling out the nozzle like you did isn't quite enough, as the slicer expects the bead to be ironed flat, against the swelling that can occur right after the filament leaves the nozzle as the plastic molecules unfurl; but sanding a little flat on the nozzle should do it.
Interesting as always. With all of the waggle (you can se it on video), it looks like you need a larger diameter lead screw.
Great project. Maybe a BLtouch + mesh bed leveling will save you some pain.. Also adding X braces to link the vertical pillars would make a big change on the lateral stiffness of the frame. Looking forward seeing how this beast prints !
An internal valve like a ball valve that won’t change in internal volume would be perfect right before the nozzle to prevent leakage. Not sure how that would be done though.
For the bed, what about small steppers with screws and a nut to adjust the bed? You could move over the nozzle or sensor over a stepper under the bed and extend until it touches the sensor? The whole bed would have to be allowed to flex a bit. Maybe a 5x5 grid of “bed jacks”?
Well this is deserving a sub. Can't wait to see you level the bed the first time.
Even tho it sounds crazy.. But for the bed you are better off using a solid steel plate with one inch or more. Yes it will be hard to heat but if you consider that you print for a long time the energy expense is alright. Also you would have a way more stable temp. Another benefit is the added weight to the machine lowering resonance. Oh and also the bed will not bow like shot
For reliable and fast linear motion i think you should look at a beckhoff xts system. We use it all the time in the industry and it works well.
You could add colorant to the pellets and 3d print in color! Its totally worth it if you intend to print that big. Then I saw that in the video. Great job.
For the lead screw, what about some 3d printed spacers with bronze bushings? The spacers could slide within the channel. Allow the print head to push them side to side, but have them return to the middle of the empty space with something like a constant force spring (tape measure thing) and a stop pin?
To prevent having to have a large bin above the printer, you should mount a cyclone dust collector above the printer with a flexible hose to a shop vac. Then when you need to add pellets you can turn on the shop vac and vacuum up some at a lower height. You could add a pressure switch in the tube to automate turning on the vacuum.
So interesting and awesome. Subscribed!
I greatly admire your talent and knowledge. Greetings from Medellin Colombia. You think that by following your project repository step by step I am capable of making a machine like yours. I want to start. thank you
Have some minor experience with injection molding. They use a screw also but it move in and out of the barrel slightly to do retraction. The other thing is that the molds have gates in them to shut off the flow of plastic.What about making a gated nozzle. My other million dollar idea was a gated nozzle with a wide thin orifice for printing wide walls. The nozzle would have to rotate to make turns but I think it's something to look at.
1. This is awesome, and I can't wait to see the finished result!
2. I'm surprised at how the actuators sounded... Kind of want to sample it on a song later
Wow! it's a fantastic project. I'm very excited to waiting for the other video parts. See you soon
I don't think your bed leveling idea is going to work the way you think. You are basically relying on the springs to push the bed flat. More than likely though, the springs are not going to be strong enough and a downward warp in the plate is just going to compress the spring and the screw head will stick up. What you need is a threaded stud rigidly bolted to the bed that then passes through the aluminum block you made with a jam nut on each side. Then you can pull/push the bed flat as needed and it would be locked in place by both jam nuts tightened against the aluminum block.
If you're concerned about leadscrew whip, it may be worth looking into hollow shaft steppers or belt driving the leadnut instead of spinning the leadscrew.
Maybe next time openbuilds will send a strait leadscrew!
Çok güzel bir icat, tebrik ederim. Bizleri filament maliyetlerinden kurtaracaksınız. Bambu A1 için kullanabilir miyiz? uygun mudur?
We actually build a printer like this at work with this same extruder. Massive Dimensions makes an automatic feeder system for this system.
I only have one question, which wire did you use to get the fans to power up? We've been working around it for a while.
Also it will move faster than that.... :)
Very nice. But the ball screw wip at higher rpm is nuts.
For a noisch leveled bed you could go Prusa's new way of putting more single beds together to one big. So the bed is less likely to warp via heat if you put the right engineered base under it.
Also at this size it's probably mich easier to have the bed stationary and the XY-gantry moving up and down. The bed then can be pushed upwards by screws from underneath and be leveled this way. So you could use as many screws as you liked. Also your ground base then could be wood or so with the screws in it.
These are fantastic suggestions 👍 Nothing is set in stone yet for the design, so if it doesn’t work as I have planned then I will modify.
@@DrDFlo that's always perfect to hava an adjustable concept! You're definitely doing well. Keep on going and have tons of fun!
Have a look at CNC waterjet technology for a feed solution isolated away from the head. I haven’t finished your video yet so don’t know at what rate you’re going to need raw material feed. However to get rid or reduce the amount of scrap extrusion when changing materials you will need a smaller container at the head and most of the material kept at a larger hopper elsewhere which is automatically and pneumatically activated by the use of limit or proximity switches on the container at the head. Try increasing the heat at the large hopper. I have a gut feeling it will speed up the melting and consequently the extrusion. Just a suggestion
For a stable precise bed. Buy yourself a second hand pool table. The 18mm or 20mm slate bed is CNC milled it’s intended use as a pool table. Even the cheap ones are pretty good. Just make sure that the pool table bed doesn’t have dips. I found the older the table the less likely it will have dips in it. For one mass manufacturing now is not as scrutinised as it used to be for two I doubt a bad table will survive the frustrations of any pool player for too long. Also slate is stone so once heated it retains steady heat throughout very well due to the organic composition of slate. By insulating the bed (wool+styrofoam) the slate will keep a constant heat and you will not need as much energy to maintain that constant heat even if there is a power failure (many homes have heated stone floors also traditional Teppanyaki uses small granite slabs heated from below by a small flame because it allows the meat to cook slowly over a prolonged period of time with minimal energy expenditure).
Only catch with this is: will your structure and motors cope with the weight of the slate bed plus the aluminium frame attached to the bed and to axis movers which will weigh around 60-70kg/m2 for the slate plus however many Lmeters of aluminium used. It’s important to note again I mention structure (fittings and anything that makes up the structure) and motors (that’s the motor itself as well as the gears etc) should be able to handle the weight.
Your 'colourant dye' is actually called Master Batch. You can get conductive black MB upto 50% carbon. Also additives for glowing and UV resistance.
Epic. This will get noticed.
Hi excellent video, just something to consider is the weight of a large 3D printed part, maybe you will need to get stiffer springs for that so you don't lose your table alignment
Just an idea, you could use that extruder to feed a second more conventional style extruder with a 4 or 5 mm nozzle which you could control the flowrate more precisely when printing.
That was my first thought as well but then I realized that this would then run into the limitations of a filament extruder when it comes to overall flow rate. The filament being preheated would probably help with that somewhat but thermal management would be really difficult if the material is going to be close to the glass transition point and I can imagine the second extruder just becoming encased in a giant blob of preheated, oozing filament.
I don't think those springs are sufficient. A printer like this is meant to print objects weighing multiple kilograms, and the extra compression resulting from the extra weight of an in-progress print would throw out your vertical tolerances.