I’ve printed lots of parts over the last three years and my printer shows it now through worn out parts.
The most critical being the Z axes supports, my printer is a clone of Makerbot 2 Dual.
The motherboard was Makerbot 2560, sailfish firmware I took a risk and bought a QIDI Tech motherboard,which I doctored to work with my CTC printer.
The two motherboard are actually identical other than HTX connectors both with sailfish firmware. The downside of CTC printers is the wooden chassis and although parts which are laser cut are very accurate, wood compresses, which leads dimensional inaccuracies creeping in.
The solution is to make parts from PLA that have 0 tolerance, a tight fit, my printer prints this batch of PLA at -0.03 too small. I have tried to compensate for this with the CAD software but it’s not as easy to achieve as it sounds. The solution is really within the slicer and mechanical setup of the printer.
I imported the Z axes supports at 8mm which prints out at 7.7mm, I then used a reamer and the shaft itself to hone to exactly 8mm.
It’s actually the X axes dimensions, the script ‘machine code’ for the stepper motor is something like 28.23456 and the Y axes something like 29.76543. It’s a pain to compensate because one needs to print a cube which you then measure the first 20 layers in the X direction which are microns thick, then edit the script followed by printing, repeat, repeat, repeat and finally throw the printer out of the window because the cheep filament isn’t that accurate.
I once had this nailed but it was blocked with an update which stopped everyone tampering with it; it broke the licence agreement.
I’ll now try the slider compensation, which means lots of test prints or just simply live with it so here are all the parts, they are X axes dimensionally 0.03mm too small but they don’t need to fit into another printed part
Oh, I meant to say that trying to compensate that dimension in Autodesk is a pain due to the fact you have to print part after part for every decimal point you change…’life too short’ my filament cost me £6 for 1Kg reel, maybe if I spent £50+… but it’s not worth it for my hobby printing.
Get a CTC £187 on eBay, then upgrade the mechanics with 3D printed parts, the motherboard is Makerbot Atmega 2650 one of the best out there. A lot of other makes use the same motherboard and that’s the important part; if you don’t get on with 3D printing just sell it on…
“ just to let you know that Makerbot blocked the USB interface for the CTC” but it also uses SD cards, the other thing to look out for if you get s CTC is the one that has it’s firmware on a dongle, do not get one of those it’s a Chinese rip off to get you to pay every time it expires.
No wonder, cheapest I found for PLA was £9 on eBay, cheapest I found last week was around £11.
I still have 19 various 1kg rolls in used state at the moment though.
