Budget 3D Printer Build and Mods: Ender-3

In reply to Ashyukun (Robert) :

For your peeling problem; Have you tried putting a coating of gluestick glue down on your print surface? I now use it on everything, and have no problem with peeling even with ABS and no enclosure.

In reply to TheTallOne17 :

I have not, but the S1 has the sort of rough plastic bed with the metallic backing so I didn't figure that having to clean the glue stick off would be a lot of fun. For the most part it's not been a problem, but admittedly yesterday was a pain in the ass. I thought that I had it dialed in nicely and printed out a mount for a webcam to make it easier to keep an eye on prints in progress, but then after a few hours of it being off decided to print off a LEGO Ruler overnight- and after 3 failed attempts at starting it (the initial outline kept coming off the bed) I gave up and waited until this morning to try again- and again it took me several starts to get it to behave. The problem seems to be that the Z offset does not want to stay consistent and varies heavily... once this print is done I'm going to get my measuring tools out and try and figure out if something's out of alignment and causing the problem. I'd expect some variation with removing and taking the bed off, but the print before I started trying to print the ruler came off the bed without having to pull the bed off of the printer so I didn't think it would have changed that much.

However one good thing from yesterday was that I spent some time printing and measuring calibration cubes and tweaking the steps on the printer and successfully printed a LEGO piece that fits far better than any have in the past, so I hope to try again with printing a few with the metallic filament before too long.

In reply to Ashyukun (Robert) :

Does the bed surface come off? My Prusa has a spring steel bed that is held in place with magnets, so when its time to clean the glue off I just run it under the sink and a quick scrub gets it perfectly clean since gluestick dissolves in water

Edit; I see that it does come off, but if you're having consistency issues that wont be a good solution for you. The Prusa re-calibrates itself every print

In reply to TheTallOne17 :

I run the S1 through its leveling sequence before each print and usually check the Z offset, which seems to be the most annoying problem to get to be consistent. I've done some Googling and others have had similar issues and after checking and correcting the squareness of the gantry have had better luck. There's also a firmware update that changes it so if you preheat the bed and then run the leveling/auto-home/Z-azis adjustment it will keep the bed pre-heated so you're adjusting it at the temps it will be running it which should help a bit too. Once the current print finishes I'll check the squareness and if it's not running it install the newest firmware.

It may be a bit of a PITA to get things set properly, but when they do it works out great- I've even largely got the hang of using the filament change gcode- though I really want to find out if there's a way to get it to print out a line along the side after the change like it does when a print starts since the first small bit of the print after the change never quite works out right (as you can see with the '16' on the diagonal top of the LEGO ruler below).

Ugh. I think I may have to see if printing bricks that have the little cylinders on the bottom of them upside-down... of the 6 parts in this print that have them, half of them have at least one of the little dots that didn't adhere properly. Printing them upside-down though will require printing those parts with supports. :/

If the cylinders are vertical, I don't see why you'd need supports

In reply to russde :

I'm not using supports when printing it as I've got it shown- but if I flip the parts over the have the small cylinders in the middle so there's a larger area to adhere to the bed (the part at the bottom- a 2x6 plate with the large circles in the middle- printed fine, at least until the whole thing crashed because of one of the other parts coming unstuck). But there would be a lot of unsupported flat surfaces that way that I would need to have the supports for.

In reply to Ashyukun (Robert) :

Ah, like a raft...I was thinking vertical supports, like a tree for an overhanging surface

russde said:

In reply to Ashyukun (Robert) :

Ah, like a raft...I was thinking vertical supports, like a tree for an overhanging surface

No, it does involve vertical supports... it's hard to picture or even show. It only really comes into play with 1 x N pieces, since they're the ones that have the little columns in between where the pips go. For example, here's a 1x8 plate:

Printed in this orientation, it doesn't really need any vertical support, since the underside of it looks like this:

and both the outer walls and the small cylinders in the middle support the flat plane of the part well enough. However, if it is printed upside-down as oriented in the second picture, it does require supports for that flat plane to print properly. Obviously the ideal way to print it is the first orientation- but I've so far had horrible luck with the little cylinder bottoms printing and adhering well to the print surface. 

Try using a skirt to assist adhesion. The other trick is try tweaking your z offset to improve first layer "squish".

For something that's dimensionally pretty tight like Lego, you really need to calibrate your X/y/z and E steps though.

In reply to Gammaboy :

Dialing in the Z-offset has been one of the biggest challenges- I think I've got it pretty well figured out now, but it's a balancing act of getting the Z-offset and bed temperature such that things adhere properly and don't delaminate but also aren't impossible to get off the bed.

I have gone through and calibrated the x/y/z with a cube- haven't calibrated the E-steps yet, but I also haven't seen much issues from that. Using a skirt has been the default I've used for PLA; a brim has been much better for ABS though. LEGO though are going to be the ultimate challenge... I'm pretty certain I'm going to have to do some tweaking of the model files to get things to print out just right.

Gah, sorry, I meant brim. I always get skirt and brim mixed up. Of course, it'll be a pain in the arse to clean up the brim around the dots. Using a non tree type support can help with supporting small features like the dots too. Even more of a pain to clean up though.

E steps is worth doing, if you're under extruding it can be more finicky with adhesion, and it will also affect your dimensional tolerances.

I ultimately went to automatic bed leveling on my CR10 because a minor warp in my build plate meant it was nigh on impossible to get consistent behaviour with manual 4 point leveling.

What kind of build plate are you running? Quite often stuff will just pop off the factory textured glass as it cools, I've also heard of letting it come down to room temp and then putting the build plate in the fridge to get it to pop the parts off.

In reply to Gammaboy :

My S1 came with the automatic bed leveling setup already included, and I run it after pretty much every print. It came with the magnetic spring-steel build plate. I've also manually leveled the bed a few times to make sure it's as close to level as possible.

Honestly, I'm thinking that if I really want to get the LEGO pieces to print out properly I'm going to need to move down to a smaller nozzle than the stock .4. For the moment I've not been worrying about the LEGO and have had other things to do- I printed off a 3D printed 'care package' for my family to show some of what it can do (a bead tray for my Mom, a metric bolt & nut gage and 4 painting pyramids for my Dad, a dragon phone-holder keychain for my brother, and my prototype 2-color keychain for my wife's non-profit. I drew up in Fusion 360 and printed out a riser for my iMac to put my external BRD burner underneith it, for the last day have been printing off as many of the keychains as possible since the non-profit has a show coming up this next week and having the at the merch table wouldn't hurt (it takes like 7g of filament per keychain, so each one costs like $0.20 to print and the keychain part is like $0.10 make, so even selling them for just $2 apiece would be a decent fundraiser).

Oh, and mid last-week I set up Octoprint on my iMac that sits right next to the printer, so it's nice to be able control and monitor prints that way. Still haven't been able to figure out how to get the webcam plugged into the iMac to work with Octoprint yet to do timelapses, but I can stream it using another app so I can see how things are going remotely. 

Finally- yesterday I finally got around to working on the front end of the E46, and as part of that installed the cold air scoop that I printed out (using ABS of course so it doesn't melt all over the radiator)- it's hopefully the first of many car parts I'll print and use. Someone sells the .STL files of the convertible trim covers that are prone to breaking, but I kind of want to try scanning one in myself since there are a few weaknesses in the design I'd like to try some ways to fix.

So, I've been running Octoprint to handle managing jobs and the likes from my iMac instead of on the printer itself and up until last night it's been a big improvement. Unfortunately one issue with the printer and its current firmware and Octoprint is that it doesn't have the functions enabled that let the printer feed more advanced info to Octoprint- including the filament runout sensor. So the print that I ran overnight last night ran out of filament, and since Octoprint was controlling it and not the printer (which would have paused the print when the sensor tripped), it kept going. The good thing is that particular print was one that ironically running out of filament shouldn't be a problem- I was printing a 'lamp shield' to keep some of the glare from one of our lights in the house from shining in The Dancer's eyes when we're on the couch watching TV and I had made it a bit taller than it may have needed to be. But I guess I need to figure out how to modify and re-compile the firmware so that on prints where that would have mattered that it can print and let me replace the filament...

Just finished assembling Ender 3 v2 for AK2, and it is failing first print. It goes to front left corner of bed, makes one dot, then raises up from bed and stops. Progress bar goes to 100% and it begins cool-down. Any suggestions? I'm too old for this E36 M3, so use real small words. Google was no help.

In reply to AngryCorvair (Forum Supporter) :

The first thing I would do is check and make sure that everything is plugged in properly (which I'm guessing that you did). I'm making guesses based on my Ender 3 S1 which is pretty similar, but I'm assuming that you were able to home it properly? I don't think it would cause what you're seeing, but have you leveled the bed and set the Z-offset? Confirmed that the hot end is heating up properly and can extrude filament?

If all of that has been done and seems to be working properly, what are you trying to print? And what are you using for a slicer?

In reply to AngryCorvair (Forum Supporter) :

What kind of file are you printing from? .stl?

Have you tried slicing it again, saving it to your SD card, ejecting the SD card, and printing again?

Turbo_Rev said:

In reply to AngryCorvair (Forum Supporter) :

What kind of file are you printing from? .stl?

Have you tried slicing it again, saving it to your SD card, ejecting the SD card, and printing again?

Yeah, this. I've had very similar to what you described, prints a tiny bit, progress bar goes to 100%, starts cool down, and every time it's been a slicer bug - the giveaway has been the gcode file has been tiny. Change one little thing in the slicer (like move the object slightly from the default position) and away it goes with no problem. It's absolutely a bug in Cura and the default Creality version of Cura.

In Lizard scanner news, Kickstarter has refunded the pledges for the lizard, and Creality is offering to supply the scanner to those that pledged at the same price as the Kickstarter campaign... So, I guess I'll find out in a couple of weeks what I get!

Thanks for the help! We probably won't be able to dig into this again til Sunday 6/5.

Since I haven't posted about things in a while I figured an update was due...

My setup has gotten a bit more advanced... the printer is now running Klipper/Mainsail via the Raspberry Pi (it's under the iMac screen, behind the small touchscreen running KlipperScreen). I've done some tuning and checking and thanks to Klipper am running the printer at much higher speeds now- I need to put togther the accelerometer setup to run Input Shaper and bump the speed up even higher. The result of all of this is being able to print much faster with much better quality output on a consistent basis. 

The only thing that I'm not thrilled about with Mainsail is that unlike Octoprint it doesn't have the 'cancel object' plugin- but I can install and run Octoprint instead of Mainsail if I find that I really miss it.

Alright, Time to join this thread....

I daydreamed a while back that my FRS needed a rally style light pod. Does it really? Absolutely not. Does it seem like a neat project to learn/relearn some skills. So, here's a quick overview - I'll post more about the actual 3d printigng parts, since that's this thread, but TL:DR, i 3d printed a mold to make a fiberglass lightpod for my FRS as an experiment. It worked!

Concept:

Mold model (needed to be split into ender-sized chunks

First prints - on the "soft bed" that came with the printer, complete with rafts... that took sooooo much time.

All the prints combined (partially glued up)

First pull from the mold, taped in place. It worked!!

In reply to bdashrian :

Heeeeeeeeell yes you needed that headlight cluster. That's awesome. 

How hard was it to lay fiberglass over the mold? Did you document the process? 

In reply to bdashrian :

I'm with Turbo_Rev, that's awesome! I'm also curious about how the process went since I've considered something similar- though the pie-in-the-sky thing I want to do for the E46 I was thinking of just outright printing using ABS.