Budget 3D Printer Build and Mods: Ender-3

First attempt at designing something from scratch in Fusion 360 and printing it- a keychain fob with The Dancer's non-profit's logo on it. Overall I'm pleased with it, but I need to make a few changes- the tab where the hole for the keychain is needs to be thicker, there's absolutely zero chance that it doesn't break off very quickly as thin as it is. And I had really wanted to have the full logo (which has the name as well) on it, but I've not figured out how to get F360 to play nice with it- I have a vector file of it, but the text is messy and I get an error whenever I try and finish the sketch when it has the text in it. And it's not a standard font I can just re-create either. 

Fixing the thickness of the tab now (I should figure out how the parametrics in it work so I could have just adjusted those vs. having to re-do carving out the tab and making the hole).... may try the filament change to print the base with the original un-spooled white filament (while I'm sitting at my desk and can babysit it) and swapping to the blue for the logo.

Mostly success! It has some issues, but I'm pretty certain that all of those were a result of my using the clearly very crappy white filament that came with the printer for the base and it didn't want to adhere to the bed properly (the nicer filament recommends heating the bed to 70, I think the crappy filament didn't like that) on the end away from the hole. But I think if I were using decent filament (I want to try a run of this using the glow-in-the-dark filament I have sitting in the car) that it would have come out almost perfect...

Looks good!

Mine clogged again, I think I did too many prints without re-leveling the bed. Need to mess with it more. 

Had my first really annoying print failure overnight last night... I left the printer printing out the bottom of a nice desktop organizer and a couple of filament spool clips, and something went horribly wrong about halfway through. As near as I can tell, the bottom of the clips never quite adhered to the build surface properly and some how the mess of filament from them managed to drag the print head off in the Y axis so that the upper half of the organizer was offset by about an inch. It's been doing better today with my sitting next to it, of course. I have like 3 spools of filament showing up this afternoon (the silky/metallic silver one that was supposed to arrive tomorrow, a neon-green spool of flexible to try out, and a spool of teal to print things for The Dancer), and then have a sample pack of 250g of 4 basic colors showing up tomorrow. I badly want to try printing ABS, but should really have an enclosure before trying that, which will require re-arranging things in the office to have a good place for the printer since where it is now isn't wide enough put an enclosure around the printer. Which sucks, because there's a repair piece for the E46's headlight housing that I'd love to print out.

For now though, the printer is humming away printing a USB/SD card holder that attaches to the top of the printer. I found a really cool Ghost Trap SD card holder on Thingiverse, but want a) it will take like 6 hours to print, so is better for when I'm not sitting here and b) should ideally be printed in black filament, which I won't have until tomorrow. I know for a fact I'm going to give at least one of those as a Christmas present to one of my cousins.

If all goes well in testing out the new filament, especially shiny one, I'm hoping to set it up to print a spiral vase overnight for the LEGO sunflower set that arrived yesterday...

In reply to Ashyukun (Robert) :

Have you looked at OctoPrint? Short version: Raspberry Pi based surveillance for 3D prints. All free, open source software. There's even a plug in that will auto-detect failed prints and stop your printer for you. You can load .stl files online without an SD card, etc etc.

I was getting bed adhesion problems after rebuilding an engine next to my printer.  Turns out the bed needs to be both hot and not covered in dirt/dust to work.  The only other issue I have had was resolved by a relevel.  

Perfect timing! Almost to the second as the print of the SD card holder finished I got a notification from Amazon that all of my filament had been delivered. I wanted something to use as a test for new filament to see what settings worked best and I found one that I liked: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3681299

I scaled it down to half-size so it only uses like 1g of filament, and I'm making several files with different nozzle and bed temperatures to test out and see which ones work best for each spool of filament. It's pretty adorable, and works pretty well as a test. I LOVE the color of the teal filament- I am definitely going to have to try and make a metallic silver base/teal logo keychain for The Dancer...

Holy. Carp.... the keychain printed out with the metallic silver & teal filament is by far the best-looking thing that I've made to date. It helps to have finally (apparently) gotten the Z-offset dialed in properly and also have found the 'ironing' open in the slicer. And because The Dancer was curious, I did the math- ignoring the cost of the printer itself, the keychain itself uses 6g between the two filaments, which came out to roughly $0.15. So (as I anticipate may be the case) if she wanted to print them up and sell them to raise money for the non-profit, even selling them for just $2 each would be a 1300% profit. I wish I could figure out how to get the full logo with the script into F360 properly, that would be even better... 

In reply to Ashyukun (Robert) :

Love it. Is the logo inlaid, or just laying on top, glued, etc?

russde said:

In reply to Ashyukun (Robert) :

Love it. Is the logo inlaid, or just laying on top, glued, etc?

Logo looks like it stands proud of the base.  You wait till the base is completely printed, then change filament mid-print.

Mr_Asa said:

russde said:

In reply to Ashyukun (Robert) :

Love it. Is the logo inlaid, or just laying on top, glued, etc?

Logo looks like it stands proud of the base.  You wait till the base is completely printed, then change filament mid-print.

This, exactly. I tried once making one with the gcode to pause the print at the layer I wanted to change the filament at, but it went awry (in part because I forgot to thread the filament through the filament sensor...) and have been gunshy about doing it that way so I've just kept an eye on it, paused it, changed the filament, and then resumet it when I can tell it's done with the top layer of the base.

Just kicked off my largest (in time and filament used) print yet... hopefully I don't wake up to another mess of filament like I did this morning...

So the initial attempt at printing the overnight job looked like it was going to have issues after a few layers, so I stopped the print and spent forever cleaning off the build surface (the flexible magnetic sheet that comes with the S1 seems to be really good for adhesion but can be a pain to clean off) before adjusting a few of the settings and trying again- and this time unless something really stupid happens in the next 4 hours it looks like it should finish.

I did discover something interesting last night though- apparently the noise from the printer carries more than I expected through the floor to the den below where our main TV is and The Dancer's 'office' for her non-profit is and it was driving her nuts yesterday since she didn't know what it was. On the whole, the S1 is pretty quiet- but after observing it for a while this morning the noise that seems to be carrying so badly is the extruder retract/extend when the head moves between areas. Once this print finishes I'm going to toy some with the settings and see if lowering the retract speed will help with the noise. If that doesn't help any, the only solution may be to build an enclosure that has some sound damping built into it- which wouldn't be the end of the world since I have been figuring on building/getting an enclosure anyway since I'll need one to keep the temps up to print with ABS.

In reply to Ashyukun (Robert) :

For sound damping I'd try your basic KISS attempt.  A lot of noise is transmitted through resonance, so put a nice thick rubber mat under the printer.  I've also heard that a concrete paver under the rubber mat can help and theoretically I can see it working, but it feels like too much for too little. 

From there, an enclosure definitely helps.  It will probably do most of what you need.

Next is stuff that gets more involved.  Reducing current to the stepper motors or replacing the stepper motors with quieter ones is a good move.

Read up on "3d printer noise damping" and you should get plenty of info.

Mr_Asa said:

In reply to Ashyukun (Robert) :

For sound damping I'd try your basic KISS attempt.  A lot of noise is transmitted through resonance, so put a nice thick rubber mat under the printer.  I've also heard that a concrete paver under the rubber mat can help and theoretically I can see it working, but it feels like too much for too little. 

From there, an enclosure definitely helps.  It will probably do most of what you need.

Next is stuff that gets more involved.  Reducing current to the stepper motors or replacing the stepper motors with quieter ones is a good move.

Read up on "3d printer noise damping" and you should get plenty of info.

Putting a rubber mat (I have some foam floor squares purchased a ways back with the- laughable given my history of completing things- intent of making shadowboxes for my tools) under it is what I'm going to try first along with pulling back the retraction speed. Overall the S1 is pretty quite- all of the stepper motors are very quiet except for the filament direct drive when it retracts and extends to move between places it's placing material, so i'm hoping lowering the speed on it will help with that. 

So, mixed results from the long overnight print. The good: with the exception of the one tall part popping off before it finished due to the bottom having curled up, the print completed successfully. The metallic silver also looks really good. The bad: The aforementioned curling that caused the tall part to pop off the baseplate, and the parts (all of the parts that the LEGO BTTF DeLorean uses for its hood) are horribly inconsistent and not only don't fit together well with actual LEGO parts (which wasn't a surprise) but also don't fit well with each other- in some cases the dimensional differences being very obvious without even any measuring. It's not even consistent among parts- of the 4 1x1 plates that I printed off, 3 of them clearly have too small of an opening on the bottom while 1 is pretty much right. I don't know whether that's a function of the printer itself or whether it's something with the slicer. 

For now though, it's clear that I need to do a lot more work on figuring things out before trying any more big LEGO prints. Printing out a bracket to help a bit with cable management now after putting a foam square down under the printer and lowering the retraction speed. It seems to have lowered the volume of the print head, but ironically this print is likely not the best for this since it doesn't involve the extruder jumping around a lot between parts... I'm going to have to put together another print to stress-test it and see how it does later. I may do that stress test with a few of the 1x1 LEGO pieces to see it I can figure out what happened there.

For those who need (want?desire?) filament GST has a deal going on, buy now, for $9.99 a roll (1 kg) and they ship in about 30 days.

https://tinyurl.com/39jk6v6v

I've ordered from them in a similar deal, great stuff. PLA+, they have some PETG also, $17.99 for two, but only in clear

Printed a mini trellis for house plants.

Ashyukun (Robert) said:

horribly inconsistent and not only don't fit together well with actual LEGO parts (which wasn't a surprise) but also don't fit well with each other- in some cases the dimensional differences being very obvious without even any measuring. It's not even consistent among parts- of the 4 1x1 plates that I printed off, 3 of them clearly have too small of an opening on the bottom while 1 is pretty much right. I don't know whether that's a function of the printer itself or whether it's something with the slicer. 

Have you done any calibration work to calibrate your X and Y steps? They can be a couple of percent off out of the box and really mess things up. 

As far as noise goes, my CR10 has a silent stepper board, but I found a significant reduction in transmitted noise by printing a set of isolation feet. There's some that use TPU filament as an isolator, some use squash balls, the ones I used were just 2 parts printed in PLA (a main spring and a helper). Replacing all the fans with Noctua really helped shut it up too, but apparently if you haven't got a silent stepper board, the fans aren't your biggest noise source by a long shot.

Gammaboy said:

Ashyukun (Robert) said:

horribly inconsistent and not only don't fit together well with actual LEGO parts (which wasn't a surprise) but also don't fit well with each other- in some cases the dimensional differences being very obvious without even any measuring. It's not even consistent among parts- of the 4 1x1 plates that I printed off, 3 of them clearly have too small of an opening on the bottom while 1 is pretty much right. I don't know whether that's a function of the printer itself or whether it's something with the slicer. 

Have you done any calibration work to calibrate your X and Y steps? They can be a couple of percent off out of the box and really mess things up. 

As far as noise goes, my CR10 has a silent stepper board, but I found a significant reduction in transmitted noise by printing a set of isolation feet. There's some that use TPU filament as an isolator, some use squash balls, the ones I used were just 2 parts printed in PLA (a main spring and a helper). Replacing all the fans with Noctua really helped shut it up too, but apparently if you haven't got a silent stepper board, the fans aren't your biggest noise source by a long shot.

I haven't done anything to calibrate the X & Y- that might be something I should look into.

Honestly, after putting the whole thing on a foam square and lowering the retraction speed from 45 to 30, if you're not in the room with it you can't hear it at all- I had it running all yesterday afternoon and evening after making the changes and couldn't hear it at all downstairs and it was running the majority of the evening without a single comment from The Dancer about it, so I think that I've got the noise issue handled. I also have an enclosure (one of the foil-fabric ones) coming in on Monday (along with a spool of ABS), so that will hopefully help with the fan noise (though switching to quieter fans would not hurt).

After a weekend's worth of running off random things with the different filaments that I've picked up, I was curious- what brands/kinds of filaments have you all had the best luck with? So far I think I've been the most happy with the Teal American Filament PLA that I picked up to make things for The Dancer with- it's printed the most consistently and looks really good. The Blue SUNLU PLA that was the first spool of filament I picked up has also worked well. I've been least happy with the white filament that came with the printer, and also not the most impressed with the 4-color assortment of PLA I picked up- which amusingly is not available on Amazon any more.

The enclosure arrived yesterday:

It does cut the fan whine down a slight bit, but since it's just essentially heavy fabric (I think some of the nicer ones have actual foam padding between the layers as well, this one unfortunately did not) it doesn't do as much as I would have liked. It does clearly trap heat though, which should make printing with ABS possible and seems to have helped some with the PLA prints. One thing I definitely do not like about it is that you can only see into the enclosure from the front, which means that for the most part you cannot see anything for the first hour or so on prints that are not as large in the X-Y directions. It is also as you can see from the picture pretty dark- but I have a light coming in later today and already have the brackets for it printed out and mounted on the top crossbar.

I had also picked up a set of hardened steel nozzles since I have several spools of glow-in-the-dark filament which I've ready is rather abrasive and will kill the standard brass nozzles pretty quickly, and I swapped one on yesterday- but was completely unable to get the settings such that I could actually print anything decently so swapped back to the original brass nozzle and things have been going just fine. 

Hopefully later today I'll be able to swap in the spool of ABS I have and see if I can figure out the settings to print properly with it- there's several things for the E46 I want to print out with it as well as possibly trying to upgrade to the 40mm fans to quiet things down a bit more.

The steel nozzles have to run a bit hotter at the heater element compared to the brass ones, you may need to bring the nozzle temp up a bit compared to what you're expecting.

In reply to Gammaboy :

I had bumped it up a fair bit and it just wasn't going well. I'll probably revisit it down the line a bit, but since I'm hoping to print some ABS parts for the E46 and ABS has to be printed at a higher temp I don't want to compound it by having to raise the temp even further with the steel nozzles...

Any time I change nozzle material I run through PID Tuning.

The material reacts to heat differently, so the various settings designed around ramping the heat up and holding it need to be tweaked.