Bootstrapping Voron V0.2 r1 LDO kit

[Sojin]

My name is Kurt and this is my build. I chose to go with an LDO kit for my first Voron in the hopes to go down a well-traveled path with a lot of folks having "been there, done that". I previously built a Prusa Mk3s which is straight lego build-by-the-numbers by comparison. Most of my printing on the Prusa has been PETG, using a Chris Warkocki sourced profile that seemed to just 'work'. I started to source parts for a Bear Prusa build, and then Voron dropped on the scene. I realized I didn't need a second bed-flinger and started planning on doing a Voron build. 

I ordered my LDO kit from Fabreeko and was very happy with the prompt shipping and packaging. I also ordered a set of PIF printed parts at the time and went with Black and Radium Green from Fusion Filaments. I've always been a sucker for that black/neon green aesthetic. My Bear build was going to be black/neon green, so this is a nod towards what might have been.

I'm posting the pictures I've taken up to this point and welcome any observations, questions, or suggestions for my build/process. Thanks for following along! 

It begins:

[Sojin]

I went through and labeled all my extrusions with painters tape when I first started building. I didn't pay close enough attention and only had one of the 'D' extrusions marked correctly. I remember thinking "Only one? Weird" I had mis-labeled the second 'D' extrusion as a 'C/H' extrusion and of course, of all the C/H extrusions I could have used for the Z-axis, I chose the mis-labeled 'D'.
I only realized my mistake when I went to mount the front vertical extrusions and was supposed to have two D's. I initially thought LDO had mixed up and resigned myself to having to submit a trouble ticket. Before doing that though, I combed over all the extrusions I'd used so far and found the 'missing' D extrusion. I figured this out at 1:00 AM, and was faced with tearing down nearly the entire build to extract the misplaced extrusion. I just sighed, and went to bed.

After a nights sleep, I woke up and contemplated my options. I remembered that while I was using an LDO kit that came with everything pre-drilled and tapped, many folks are drilling and tapping their self-sourced extrusions. Quick trip to the drill-press and the missing access hole appeared to convert the CH extrusion into a D. 

That 1:00 AM realization:

 

Drilled access hole:

Edited September 16, 2023 by Sojin

[Sojin]

Early on in the build process

[Sojin]

How it's looking today

Electronics:

Shortened a lot of the power cables and re-crimped with ferrules:

 

 

Edited September 16, 2023 by Sojin

[mvdveer]

Wow - great progress and lovely build. With regards to the extrusions,I think I can say "been there, done that!" 

[Sojin]

I got the panels mounted yesterday, along with the spool holder. I did run into an issue with the door panel though. The LDO kit comes with some divots drilled into the door panel, which I'm assuming are for the magnets. The official Voron build guide puts the magnets in the door handle. I couldn't find anything in the LDO build notes regarding these cutouts and how to use them properly, so I went with the Voron guide/handle route for magnet placement. After getting everything mounted, I wasn't really impressed with the magnet holding power on the door. I had two extra magnets left over, so I thought I'd try to put one of the extra magnets in the divots for a little extra holding power as the magnets would be closer to the magnet holders on the frame.

 

Of course, the extra magnet doesn't fit into the divot flush, so that idea was a bust. Then, when trying to pull the magnet out with the Knipex plier wrench, the magnet cracked in half leaving a jagged half magnet proud of the sealing surface, with no good way to grab it anymore. I tried to pry it, grab it with serrated needle nose pliers, and even contemplated pulling the handle off and drilling through the door so I could drive the magnet out with a punch. What I ended up doing was using a small drill to make a small divot I could then use a pick to pry the magnet remnant out with. Crisis averted.

 

One other build note for future V0.2 builders. If you're using no-drop nuts like I have been, the magnet holders mounted to the frame is the part where you can't use no drop nuts. I missed that and when preloading the nuts, I used the no-drop holders just like I had for every other pre-loaded nut in the build. This is the part where it bites you in the butt. I ultimately had to push all the pre-loaded no-drop nuts to the side and use the LDO drop-in nuts that came with the kit to get the magnet holders mounted. Might have to see if I can do a remix of the no-drop holders later specifically for this mount.

 

Edited September 17, 2023 by Sojin

[Sojin]

I also put the Prusa to use and printed up a panel mod to get more direct filament routing.

Thanks to Maple Leaf Makers for the model: https://www.printables.com/model/408745-v0-upper-rear-bowden-inlet-urbi

 

[Sojin]

This afternoon I got the top hat put together, along with mounting the bottom panel over the power supply. I think the physical build is now complete.

 

Also, pro tip for using Loctite in a bottle. The little nub on the tip is just the right size to slip a Leur Lock blunt needle tip on. Makes for much better metering when trying to put Loctite on tiny bolts. When I'm done using it, I just blow through the Leur Lock needle onto a paper towel to clear any residual Loctite out and it's ready for use the next time around. 

Edited September 18, 2023 by Sojin

[claudermilk]

Dang! Warp speed build! I'm still at mounting power supply and PCBs on mine (hopefully today if the assistant is up for it).

I think mixing up extrusions (as well as preloaded nut mistakes ) is a required part of a V0 build.

[Sojin]

14 hours ago, claudermilk said:

Dang! Warp speed build! I'm still at mounting power supply and PCBs on mine (hopefully today if the assistant is up for it).

I think mixing up extrusions (as well as preloaded nut mistakes ) is a required part of a V0 build.

This whole build took about 3 weekends. I just got around to compiling the pictures I'd taken and typing up a build diary, so it just looks like a 2 day build.

[Sojin]

More misadventures on the way to actually pushing plastic. 

After getting all the panels attached and feeling very satisfied with myself, I decided to fire it up and see if I can do some startup checks.

Klipper connects correctly. *woot*

Once I got the jumpers installed on the X and Y drivers on the SKR Pico, sensorless homing seems to be working. *woot*

Ran the hotend up to 210*, temp ramped up perfectly. *woo... "wait a sec. Why is the hotend fan not spinning?"

I double and triple checked my wiring, combed over every build document I could find on the Picobilical, and generally tore at what little hair I have remaining. No matter what I did, my hotend and part cooling fans wouldn't spin. I had just decided that I had some bad fans and tore the toolhead off and got it mostly disassembled to swap out the fans, when I noticed a feature list for the Picobilical. "Both 5V and 24V fan support" said the bullet point. That got me thinking "okay, that has to be a setting or jumper somewhere" With a little more digging, sure enough, I found the configuration jumpers, and 'lo and behold, they were configured for 5V, when the kit fans are 24V. *DOH!*

Got the jumpers moved to the correct position and then looked at my torn apart toolhead on the bench. "This wiring needs to be cleaned up or I'm never gonna get a serial number..." So, since I had everything torn apart, seemed a perfect time to work on my JST crimping game and give the toolhead a haircut. 

Started off with the extruder motor wiring by chopping it basically in half. Nice straight shot to the toolhead board now.

Did the part cooling fan leads next.

Then I started feeling myself and decided the Revo thermistor lead needed a trim as well. "What is this madness??"

I thought I'd completely screwed up trying to shorten the blue thermistor wire once I'd cut it. There's like 3 wire strands in the blue woven sheath. I panicked thinking I wasn't going to be able to get a decent crimp on such a small amount of wire, and the frayed woven sheath didn't want to cut either. I had a replacement LDO hotend in my West3D shopping cart hovering over the checkout button... Then I took a step back from the ledge, took a deep breath, and took another run at actually crimping a JST onto the measly 3 wires. I realized you can just slide the sheath back, twist the wires together, and get a decently clean crimp. (Thank you Engineer PA-09's!) Then slide the sheath up and do the strain relief crimp. Success! Did the second wire as well, and removed the extra hotend from my shopping cart. Sorry West3D, next time.

Trimmings:

 

Buttoned everything up with a couple of zip ties. 

 

Mounted the toolhead back up. 

 

Fired up the printer again, and told Mainsail to give me 210* on the hotend. Ramped right up, temps monitored correctly, and the fan spins!! *WOOT!!*
Now back to figuring out how to level the bed correctly and maybe push plastic soon. One step closer to that serial number! 

 

Edited September 20, 2023 by Sojin

[mvdveer]

You should become an author - had a good chuckle with you. No doubt about the serial - looking forward to welcoming this little one to the Voron Family.

[claudermilk]

LOL, good post. I literally just installed these boards yesterday (my update coming momentarily). I'll double check that voltage jumper.

Stripping those woven insulators sucks. Been there, done that. After seeing Steve do it, I followed his lead and use the side cutters to trim the woven sheath after the main stripping cut; that helps a lot.

I ate up a lot of the extra wire slack by routing them all to the center and out that little path. There's little enough extra it's easy to kind of fold the wires down.

[Sojin]

I am remiss in updating my build log! More hair pulling shenanigans over the last week since our last episode.

I had a bit of a side project in trying to get my workbench set up. Got a couple of Ikea Skadis pegboards mounted and started making mounts for my tools.

But, back to the Voron!
Once I got the fans spinning, I started in on the rest of the startup checks. That all went well, so I started in on the Ellis guide. Got to the point I had to load filament... "This should be easy, got a 'load filament' macro built right in to Mainsail." Ha! Famous last words. Got out a brand new roll of ABS from Fusion Filament, and tried to load it up. The hotend would heat up to 250*, the fans would spin, and then when the extruder motor would try and load the filament, I got nothing but grinding of the gears on the filament.
I figured the Bondtech gears had come loose or gotten misaligned somehow. I took the toolhead off and opened it up to check the alignment. Sure enough, the gear on the driven shaft wasn't as lined up as it should be. Got that sorted out, made sure there was loctite on the grub screw, and buttoned everything back up. 
"Okay! Time to push some plastic!" Got everything set up and ready, and tried to load the filament again. More gear grinding on the filament, but nothing coming out of the hot end...

Tore the head off again, checked the alignment again, everything was perfect as far as filament alignment went. Checked the driveshaft gear float, that checked out too. "Well, while I've got this thing torn apart, I might as well see if I can dress these wires as well as @claudermilk did." I rerouted all my previously shortened wires through the middle like they're supposed to be. So at least that went right.

"Maybe there's an issue with my filament routing change" I thought. So I swapped the stock foot-mounted filament routing back on, along with it's included filament sensor.

Mounted the toolhead back up and made a third attempt to load filament. More grinding... I opened up the latch on the toolhead, manually fed the filament past the gears, then closed the latch, making sure the filament was gripped correctly in the gear drive teeth, and then hit the 'load filament' button again. No grinding, but nothing came out of the nozzle either. "Man what is going on??" I'll try some different filament. So I hit the 'unload filament' button. NOW filament comes out of the nozzle!!! The extruder was rotating in reverse the whole time! A couple of questions in the Voron discord and I figured out how to reverse the rotation in printer.cfg.

Fourth time is the charm! Hit load filament, and surprise, surprise, it actually loaded! Huzzah! Broke out Orca Slicer, just using it's built in printer and filament config for a quick test and knocked out a few hooks for my newly mounted pegboards. With only half done Ellis tuning and zero previous ABS experience, these were easily the best 3D prints I've ever made. 

This all happened this last Sunday night, and I stayed up way too late for a worknight playing with my now live printer.

Last night, I started printing off a few accent color parts I wanted to swap out.

 

How she's looking now:

Edited September 28, 2023 by Sojin

[Sojin]

Voron noob's first Voron cube. Tell me how to make it better.

[Sojin]

I gotta say. I LOVE this printer. Lots of learning and tuning yet to do. Ellis still needs to be finished. Got up to the Pressure Advance step, so still need to do that. I'm already trying to figure out the color scheme for a 300mm Trident build. Despite all the frustrations and forward and backward steps, I've been having an absolute blast with this little printer build. Thanks for coming along on the journey!

Now I just need to figure out how to do this serial number submission thing...

[Sojin]

Welp, I was printing up @atrushing's Mini Stealth Orbiter 2.0 and decided to grab my phone, shoot a video and post my serial request to reddit:

Video: 

 

Edited September 28, 2023 by Sojin

[Penatr8tor]

1 hour ago, Sojin said:

I gotta say. I LOVE this printer.

Yup, Same thing I said when I built my 2.4 300. Ya just gotta love a Voron. I can also say that same saying holds true for all of my builds, except maybe my Switchwire. It's not my favorite but it's still a great printer. Of all of my printers, my little RatRig V-Minion really stands out. I call it the little printer that could, because it just pounds out beautiful prints one after another.

@Sojin I hope you V0.2 becomes your little printer that could. Awesome work! Looks sweet!

[Penatr8tor]

2 hours ago, Sojin said:

Voron noob's first Voron cube. Tell me how to make it better.

Firstly, That's a really nice 1st time cube. Obviously, go thru the Ellis tuning guide. To get sharper corners that don't bulge, print a pressure advance part, SuperSlicer, Orca, Prusa, etc. all have the ability to ramp up the pressure advance while printing a test part to determine the best setting. As for the top surface... You have a little bit of over extrusion going on. Try dropping the extrusion multiplier about 5% for top infill. You can also do a few tricks where you print everything inside really fast but slow the speed down for just the top and outer perimeter.

[claudermilk]

Wire routing looks great on that toolhead!

I also had to put in the dir_pin reverse. The Voron startup checklist does cover this. I also cheated by inserting a short length of filament in the extruder when running the stepper buzz; that told me immediately that it was running backwards.

That first cube looks really good. Finish up the Ellis tuning guide, that should take care of the PA and the top layer finish. Then run input shaper to deal with the ghosting.

I'm at the stage of getting the first layer tuned in, then I'll run through the tuning guide and input shaper myself. First I'm looking over the stock print_start, print_end, cancel, and pause macros. I'm not real happy with how they are working.

[Sojin]

WooHoo!

[claudermilk]

Congrats!

[Sojin]

Spent the weekend printing and assembling mods. But I can't bring myself to tear apart my newly serial'd printer to install them yet. Waiting on a Picobilical kit order for a spare toolhead board to show up to finish @atrushing's Mini Stealth. Also printed up Nathan Chiu's block and tackle belted Z-mod. I find myself wanting to get a second printer before tearing into Greenie here. At least the mods look pretty sitting on my bench. 

[atrushing]

2 hours ago, Sojin said:

Also printed up Nathan Chiu's block and tackle belted Z-mod. I find myself wanting to get a second printer before tearing into Greenie here. At least the mods look pretty sitting on my bench.

They are looking nice and I like that green!

I want to make a version of my Belted Z mod that works with his block and tackle system but I have to finish other projects first.

[Sojin]

9 minutes ago, atrushing said:

They are looking nice and I like that green!

I want to make a version of my Belted Z mod that works with his block and tackle system but I have to finish other projects first.

Fusion Filaments ABS 1.5 Radium Green: https://fusionfilaments.com/1kg-abs15-filament-radium-green-20
I think you actually made the Kirigami compatible block that I ended up using. His original block was for the extrusion based bed. Found yours in your comment in the mod section.