Ulti_printer 200x300

Nick,

What's a ER40 Collet chuck..?

Indeed in the pictures I posted so far there's no specific and detailed picture of the drive mechanism itself. I'll post some more detailed pictures later on.

Chris

Here are a few pictures about that drive mechanism. I hope it's all clear now.
Most of the parts are printed with my old printers(Prusa i2), only a few are done with my (first) Ulti-Printer. So most of the parts are not high quality parts, sorry for that...

This is my 200x300 Ulti-Printer loaded with a 300mm(1' PLA reel

The filament is entering the PTFE tubing

PTFE tubing supported by a bracket

..PTFE + PLA going up...

In a curved path entering the XY-carriage

To have a free running PTFE tubing without any friction at all I added 2 small ball bearings in the upper green part of the XY-carriage. The PTFE tubing is almost touching the hobbed pulley and the ball bearing. That hobbed pulley is also selfmade, so I could make it's diameter as small as possible(5.5mm!!) The steppers axis diameter is 5mm.

Detailed view

Don't let it confuse you, this is a view looking down on the XY-carriage from my second printer,(completely printed in black), sorry for that.... You can see(barely) one of the ball bearings(guiding the PTFE) in the circular part.

About that interchangeable hotend system, these are the two electronics parts I needed to solder on the little PCB my pal Guy made for me.

One of these little PCB's are mounted in the XY-carriage itself. At right cabling leaving the carriage

The second PCB is mounted onto the hotend. To be on the save side Guy drew a dual lead for the heater on the PCB. Better save than sorrow.

Update on this one(been away for a while).
Started using bigger nozzles. I use a (selfmade) fast interchangeable hotend system. First I tested a 0.7mm nozzle which gave me rather good prints. But I got stuck at that size. Problem was not enough heat to allow smooth passage of the filament through the heaterblock and nozzle fast enough.
My goal is to print with nozzle diameters 1.0mm up to 2.0mm and at the same time go fast.
Solution to this problem is generating more heat, so I made myself a Volcano(isch) heaterblock. Advantage of that system is that the heatercartrige is place vertically instead of horizontal(like in the E3D-V6 heaterblocks.
So the filament is heated over a longer distance in the heaterblock of that Volcano.

First test done with a 1.0mm nozzle and it worked very nicely. I'm not 100% satisfied with the result. I had to reduce printspeed and raise temperature to 240°C(for PLA) to have perfect perimeters.
Started to make me a 1.2mm and also a 1.5mm hotend/nozzle.
I also had to replace the 30mm axial fan on the heatsink by a 50mm radial fan. The duct supporting the fan is also replaced to match the radial fan. Cooling of the heatsink is far better now.

First test with the 1.0mm nozzle printing PLA.
**LINK**

Another test with that 1.0mm nozzle.
And before you shoot me on this one...
I know, this little guy is not intended to print with a bazooka-like nozzle. I just wanted to test it anyway, see what happens...

First one is printed with 1mm nozzle, 0.8mm layer, temp 240° speed:55mm/s Time : 16min
second is printed with 0.4mm nozzle 0.2mm layer, temp 225° speed:80mm/s Time : 1h52mi
Both PLA

0.4mm and 1.5mm nozzle side by side...
Time to make me a hotend with that large larger nozzle and print that little boat again.

And this is how it looks like in my printer.

Duct for the heatsink cooler

Apparently rules of the forum not to post long posts..
So I had to split this post in a few separate posts, sorry about that.

First test with a 1.5 mm nozzle this time.
Perimeter looks very good in fact almost perfect. Except that the 'Z' axis does not move in a continuous motion like it always does like in all my previous 'Spiral Vase' tests. Very strange.
This behavior result in a rather strange regular pattern at the corners of this testobject.
Very first test is done at 55mm/s but that did not went well. So I had to lower speed to 35mm/s. Some extra tests are needed here to find out how to raise that printing-speed again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqEqX33Am-A&feature=youtu.be

Forgot to mention : Layer height a whopping 1.2mm..!

Why that strange pattern at the corners..?

The lift at the 'corners' of that testcube in the movie is a normal phenomenon. The reason I discovered it only now is because my pal Guy was intrigued too and performed a simulation with a regular nozzle, say 0.35 or 0.4mm. The result is exactly the same only on a smaller scale, hardly visible.

To perform a Spiral Vase test I always quickly draw a real cube. This time I drew a cube with rather large fillets at the corners. When printing a 'real' cube the lift occurs exactly at each corner and will pass unnoticed. But in my case the lift is spread over the entire fillet, resulting in that strange pattern at the corners.
I discovered also that the lift is continuous over the perimeter of the entire cube indeed, but lift during straight walls is very small, almost negligible. Most of the 'Z' lift do occur at the corners. Very strange behaviour. That path is only visible while zooming in(on screen) during simulation.
If I had chosen a cylindrical shape for my 'Spiral Vase' test I would not have noticed that fenomenon at all, neither would I have seen it with a regular cube, with 'real' corners.

What I discovered also is that this strange pattern in these 'corners' make these cubes lots stronger, very stiff.
​​​​​​​And what's more I think that pattern looks rather good too..