Refurbishing my Voron 2.4 300

[Penatr8tor]

Sorry about the extra image above, bug in the forum software I assume, can't remove it. Oh well.

Back to the build...

I'm adding a Nevermore V6 to the build. Hoping to get more consistent chamber temps.

 

 

I had some warping issues printing the fan housing but it not so severe that it'll affect performance.

[Penatr8tor]

Onto the gantry...

Most of the money invested into this re-furb is concentrated in the gantry and comprises 3 purchases. ChaoticLab CF gantry kit, ChaoticLab Belt Adjusters and a Fysetc CNC X-Beam.

 

Below is the original gantry.

 

Upgraded gantry.

 

And some closeups so that you can see the parts better. 

 

[Penatr8tor]

Next, I'm fixing an old issue with the LED lighting.

I originally designed a clip to mount the LED strips into an extrusion with diffuser cover that are angled downwards at 45 degrees. They worked well, for a while, but heat and time took it's toll. I also only had my old Tevo Tornado available to print extra parts so they were printed in PLA. I reprinted them in ASA on my VzBoT... Much nicer. You can see how the PLA parts distorted as a result of creep when compared to the newly printed ASA parts.

 

I forgot how nice these clips worked. Just slide them onto the extrusion, insert into the frame slot and then roll them down until they snap into place.

 

Nice and clean.

[Penatr8tor]

Time to get the new gantry mounted.

But first... New CNC Z-Belt tensioners. Not required but I'm on a roll LOL. FWIW, I left the old, printed Z motor assemblies. They are fine the way they are.

 

Gantry hung by zip ties and ready to have Z belts attached.

[Penatr8tor]

Got all of the Z axis belts installed and tensioned.

 

One issue I ran into with the CF gantry components was the decrease in thickness between the printed and CF parts. The CF part is 3mm thick where the printer part is 5mm. You'd think that this wouldn't be a big issue as you'd just pick a shorter screw but no.... turns out the next smaller size screw only grips like 1 thread so I printed some belt grippers that are 2mm thicker. 

[claudermilk]

Well, look at Mr. Fancy Pants! Looks great.

[Penatr8tor]

2 minutes ago, claudermilk said:

Well, look at Mr. Fancy Pants! Looks great.

Thanks,

The gantry is moving really nice with the CNC'd parts on it so, I'm happy about that.

I'm really looking forward to getting the new deck panel in place and moving on to installing the new Leviathan controller. That will be interesting. I'm also going to eliminate the X and Y drag chains and installing an umbilical. My biggest worry with that is rubbing on the inside of the top panel when printing really tall parts but then again, I don't really print a lot of those. So, we'll see.

[Penatr8tor]

Another day... another challenge...

This time around I had to come up with a creative solution for my X endstop. Previously, I used the XY endstop PCB mounted to the right-side Y rail. With the new setup the Y endstop is moved to the back right corner of the gantry and the X endstop is now mounted to the toolhead. Problem is... the switch is not depressed when the toolhead is fully to the right. For reference... Printer is laying on it's back and the view is under the X-Beam. Toolhead mount is a Mellow CNC TAP.

So I designed a clip-on bumper that snaps onto an aluminum spacer part hidden under the CF bottom plate.

Click!

Success! I still don't know if the switch is touching at the right position, it basically needs to trigger at my X=300 mark so, once I get a tool head mounted, I will see if I need to add a little nub to it or not.

[Penatr8tor]

On to the tool head and yup... more problem solving.

Since I've already installed an LGX-Lite extruder... I needed to come up with a mounting solution for my LDO toolhead PCB. I'm using the 2pc board and, if you look deep into the left side, you'll see that the 2x4 header is right up against the side of the extruder and when the main PCB is connected, it runs into the extruder. No Bueno. So, I decided to modify the drag chain mount and turn it into a PCB mount.

And Viola! PCB mount.

Fits nicely and doesn't protrude any more than the drag chain mount did. As for the 2x4 header... I ordered some female connectors and will desolder the old connector from the fan PCB and solder in 8 wires into the holes for the PCB side and add a female connector to plug into the main PCB. Still waiting on parts so, I'll update once I have this implemented.

 

[Dirk]

On 3/1/2024 at 4:19 PM, Penatr8tor said:

will desolder the old connector from the fan PCB and solder in 8 wire

All nice and good, but it seems as if you are trying to make extra work for yourself instead of simplifying things. Genius solution... I like your PCB mount.

But HartK designed this 2 part board, with the idea that you plug in the front part into the back part (cost me a spider MCU because it shifted while pushing the SB front in-as supposed to be done- blindly, and just a few days ago I discovered I wasn't the only one) 

I have seen 1 piece PCB's to solve your problem.

And you know I was going to say this, an EBB36, would even be better! Because you would get rid of all those cables! 

 

On 3/1/2024 at 4:19 PM, Penatr8tor said:

2x4 header is right up against the side of the extruder and when the main PCB is connected, it runs into the extruder. No Bueno.

and yet another genius solution from you and a lazy idea from me: is this mod for CW-2 maybe a solution for this "no-bueno" problem? In my case it solved my problem of "BTT-SB2209 thermistor pins riding against the edge of the CW2".  I Made a complaint at BTT, to fix it for the next version

The re-print will take only 10 minutes on your vzbot, but disassembly and reassembly of everything will take a bit longer I guess  But at the end, it will save you ordering all those extra parts.

Edited March 2 by Dirk

[Penatr8tor]

Hey @Dirk both good alternatives. Obviously... My problem is that I have an LGX-Lite extruder that I don't want to give up, it's too fat for the LDO hartk 2pc board so, I'm just moving the connector to the new main board location. No biggie. I'm going to redesign the hinged cable cover as well a cable / umbilical mount.

I don't 100% know how I'm going to run the wires to the tool head yet but, it will be either a traditional umbilical or I'll run a drag chain sideways.

If you look at the right rear corner of the gantry... you'll see a red CNC aluminum part where you attach a cable gland for an umbilical. I also sourced some highly flexible multi-conductor cable to go from the toolhead PCB to the controller.

You will see... I have a trick or to yet to reveal. And FWIW... I like the process of redesigning things to suit my own needs. To me that's the fun part.

[PFarm]

@Penatr8tor That awesome that you can design your own parts to suit your needs, I still need to acquire that skill.

[Dirk]

2 hours ago, PFarm said:

I still need to acquire that skill.

I have to beg my son to design a part... he is so busy already with life, that he has 'no time' for me 

And then to think that I started with all this printing all because of him...

No, true... I am also jealous of @Penatr8tor. Not just cause of his shiny expensive alu parts, but also of these genius design skills. But the best ability an engineer needs to have, is the fantasy... He can imagine every part in detail, before he ever designs anything

Makes me wonder what he does for living... Sci-Fi script writer? 

[Razor1666]

On 3/3/2024 at 1:04 AM, Penatr8tor said:

I like the process of redesigning things to suit my own needs. To me that's the fun part

@Penatr8tor When people say to me, "Do you think you can design/print that?" I get all fuzzy inside.... lol

I love the design and creating of things.  I'm still using Tinkercad. I've tried Onshape and Fusion 360.... way over my head at the minute, but I'll get there

 

[Penatr8tor]

18 hours ago, PFarm said:

@Penatr8tor That awesome that you can design your own parts to suit your needs, I still need to acquire that skill.

@PFarm I'm happy to hangout on Zoom for an hour or so and give you some hands-on CAD / Design training. Just send me a PM and I'll help you get up to speed. It's not really that hard TBH.

[Penatr8tor]

Just now, Razor1666 said:

@Penatr8tor When people say to me, "Do you think you can design/print that?" I get all fuzzy inside.... lol

I love the design and creating of things.  I'm still using Tinkercad. I've tried Onshape and Fusion 360.... way over my head at the minute, but I'll get there

@Razor1666 The problem you're encountering is having to transition from one school of thought to another. Tinkercad uses primatives and boolian add-subtract where programs like Fusion, SolidWorks and Onshape use a feature-based methodology. There's a curve to get over but once you get over it... i.e. Once you know how to do feature-based modeling... you can then switch between all of the production level CAD software without too much issue.

I offer you the same as I did for @PFarm. If you want to hop on Zoom, PM me.

[claudermilk]

What @Penatr8tor said. I support SolidWorks at work so have gotten to dabble in it. Learning Fusion360 was more a matter of figuring out the UI differences and minor changes in methodology. The basic concepts are the same.

[Penatr8tor]

17 hours ago, Dirk said:

I have to beg my son to design a part... he is so busy already with life, that he has 'no time' for me 

And then to think that I started with all this printing all because of him...

No, true... I am also jealous of @Penatr8tor. Not just cause of his shiny expensive alu parts, but also of these genius design skills. But the best ability an engineer needs to have, is the fantasy... He can imagine every part in detail, before he ever designs anything

Makes me wonder what he does for living... Sci-Fi script writer? 

Hahaha, Sci-Fi script writer sounds like fun.

To answer your question...

I'm a Mechanical Engineer of the design variety. Basically, I design products. Mostly medical devices and every so often a consumer product. I started in the 80's and still work most days, I'm semi-retired at 64. I have used and am proficient with AutoCAD, Pro/E, Solidworks, Fusion 360, Onshape and more recently Ondsel as well as numerous rendering and animation software (I used to make animations of surgical procedures). If you're interested in a few of my designs here's a list of my patents.

Here's a few cool renderings of some concepts from back in the day...

 

[Razor1666]

27 minutes ago, Penatr8tor said:

If you want to hop on Zoom, PM me.

I just might take you up on that @Penatr8tor   I do have a week of vacation coming up next week  

I totally agree with you on the thought process and methodologies.  The feature base makes more sense for scaling/resizing things and keeping all things aligned. I do like adding fillets and chamfers 

 

 

[PFarm]

1 hour ago, Penatr8tor said:

@PFarm I'm happy to hangout on Zoom for an hour or so and give you some hands-on CAD / Design training. Just send me a PM and I'll help you get up to speed. It's not really that hard TBH.

Thanks, I appreciate that and will take you up on your offer soon. Weekend better for you and what time zone are you in?

[Penatr8tor]

4 minutes ago, PFarm said:

Thanks, I appreciate that and will take you up on your offer soon. Weekend better for you and what time zone are you in?

Weekends or evenings. I'm in Texas so central time zone.

[Dirk]

3 hours ago, Penatr8tor said:

Hahaha, Sci-Fi script writer sounds like fun.

To answer your question...

I'm a Mechanical Engineer of the design variety. Basically, I design products. Mostly medical devices and every so often a consumer product. I started in the 80's and still work most days, I'm semi-retired at 64. I have used and am proficient with AutoCAD, Pro/E, Solidworks, Fusion 360, Onshape and more recently Ondsel as well as numerous rendering and animation software (I used to make animations of surgical procedures). If you're interested in a few of my designs here's a list of my patents.

Here's a few cool renderings of some concepts from back in the day...

I knew you old guys here had to be amazing. And I was right. These are amazing designs. And much more superior to those 'work-arounds' you show us

The single port suturing device, endoscopic clip application and the percutaneous transluminal manipulation devices look as if I might have seen them before.

But the fishing rod transportation design shows what you have been busy with lately

Very very cool!

Another thing to be jealous of... what a list of patents...

[Penatr8tor]

Don't sell yourself short @Dirk. It takes a good amount of "nerdiness", and you also have to be pretty sharp in general to be in this hobby so, respect back at ya. 

As for the patents... Medical devices are always patented because the patent is easy to defend so, the device companies patent everything. The reason why I say defend is because some other countries don't care about copying your stuff, right? Well, since medical devices (in western countries) are regulated by agencies like the FDA and as such, must be approved, inspected, tracked, stamped, etc... That creates a barrier to IP theft and if you do have to defend, then you have regulatory history on your side.

So yeah, if you want a lot of patents... design medical devices. Most are just common-sense practical tools with really fancy names. 

The fishing rod cart was a fun one though. Very cool design. It was modular and used injection molded joints and aluminum extrusions. The plastic joints were assembled from two of the same joint half, where they mated onto each other. 

Yeah, pretty cool stuff. TBH, I haven't even thought about those projects in a good while.

 

[Penatr8tor]

OK, I've been farting around with an upgrade. I currently have a BTT 5" Klipperscreen. It's nice, it works but... I want MOAR!

Back when I was building my VzBoT, I took advantage of a discount and bought 2 Mellow 7 inch LCD touchscreens. I figured I'd used them somewhere and so I'm using one on my 2.4 refurb journey.

As per usual... There are no CAD models of the display so first order of business was to reverse engineer the sh!t out of this thing... Sorry for "The Martian" reference LOL.

Now to design some printable parts... I think this is a good opportunity to give others some insight into how to model custom parts for your printer or anything really. I'm doing all of this in Fusion 360 BTW, no fancy plug ins... just stock Fusion.

So, now that I have a model of the display, the next I want to do is to save the display so that I can insert it into whatever I want to in the future. Now, we create a new design in Fusion 360 and we insert the display model into the current design. This will be my reference model, it's 100% accurate and whatever I design around it, I know, will fit (or at least that's what I tell myself LOL). At this point you need to create a mental strategy of what components you'll need to design. I decided that I would need a minimum of 3 components, a base plate, a bezel and a bracket or mount to attach the assembly to the printer.

Now that the display is inserted, I ground it so that it cannot be accidentally moved around and screw up my design (just right click on the inserted file in the browser and select ground). Next, I create 2 components in Fusion. Right click on the topmost component on the left and select "New Component" and create a Base Plate component. Then repeat and make a Bezel component. 

Ok, Let's model a simple bottom plate that the screen and bracket can mount to.

I start by activating the base plate component (press the little circular button to the right of the component name).

Then I create a sketch and, the first question that will pop into your mind will be... Where do I sketch? And that leads to the next question which is, where does the display attach to the base plate? That is where you sketch. The base plate attached to the 4 standoffs on the display, so I click the little donut shaped surface of one of the standoffs. That will be my sketch plane and no matter what I change in the future... that sketch is locked to the standoff. Next we start sketching and we draw whatever geometry is required to get a shape that can serve as a base plate. I'm not trying to include everything at this point. Just a rectangular plate with 4 holes.

Once our sketch is done we use the extrude command to create a solid object. This will be the formula moving forward for all components and all features, BTW anything that you create that displays an icon on the bottom time is referred to as a feature. Fusion is a feature based solid modeler and we make features. The timeline on the bottom looks like this.

Here are the features you see above (the play buttons on the left are obviously not features). So, you'll see 3 features with a green line above and 2 with an orange line above them. The colored lines match the color of the component, the green line denotes the main component and the 3 features from L2R are the inserted display and the two components we created (base plate and Bezel. The features under the orange line are the sketch and extrude command. If you want to make any changes... right click and edit the feature. Now I want to point something out... every time you reference a feature from another component, you create a dependency. Right now, the base plate is dependent on the display, more accurately, the face of a standoff on the display and since I also created other references (purple lines) there are other dependencies as well. Just know that you will change things and as a result, you will disconnect dependencies that will need to be erased or reattached. Ok, enough talk, below is the extruded base plate. I went with 5mm.

I then created another sketch on the bottom of the plate to do a cut extrude feature to create a rectangular hole and I also created some chamfers on the corners. I think you see how this works... Sketch -> extrude, sketch -> revolve, etc, etc, 

So far so good on the base plate, we have enough geometry to start on the bezel. And like the base plate component, I activate the bezel component and start a sketch. Again, where do we sketch from? Well, we want a wall that encloses the perimeter of the display, and we want it to start at the bottom of the base plate and grow upwards to the screen part of the display. So, I choose to use the bottom of the baseplate as my sketch plane or surface. Form there I sketch a perimeter and extrude that up to and just a little bit beyond the height of the screen and extrude the perimeter up. Then another sketch for the top and extrude that and another sketch for the step in the bottom and so on. Pro Tip: A good rule of thumb is fillets and chamfers at the end, no random fillets inserted throughout your model, this creates dozens of unwanted dependencies that will most certainly blow up in your face when you make a change down the road.

 

 

While this might look good enough for most... I want to add some cosmetic features to give the part a more Voron like design aesthetic.

Next, I start a new part and create a front skirt mount for the display. Without going into excessive detail. I grabbed the front center skirt from the Voron supplied 2.4 CAD model and cut away all the stuff I didn't need and added 2 wings to mount the display.

 

I had to play around with the height and angle and after I got it to a good location I discovered that there was no way I was going to be able to get my finger on the top to press the control buttons. So, I designed some lever style buttons. When I modeled the display, I also added the 4 switches along the top. Since I already have them in the model. I can easily create a blade that fits into a slot with a little nub on it to press the switch. On top of the switch is a button that will poke out of 4 small windows modeled into the bezel. I also added nubs to snap on the bezel. 

I designed the paddle in two pieces so that they could be printed flat and so that the layers would be oriented perpendicular to the bend moment. A clearance of 0.1mm made for a nice press fit.

 

Here's base plate with the paddles inserted and bezel. 4 M3 screws will hold in the display.

 

Finished enclosure design.

Completed assembly.

 

How do they print? Well, everything was designed to not need any supports all corners were chamfered so that the parts grew at a 45 degree angle up wards. I did use a brim on the chassis mount, still need to hit the edges with a heat gun. Overall, no fails on the printing. I did have to ream out a few tight holes.

Anyways... here's how it turned out.

I mean if this doesn't make you want to learn CAD, I can't think of a better reason.

Next update I'll have it installed.

 

[Dirk]

Great upgrade

Also a very nice and (apparently) simple lecture on how to make a 'simple' design. I say lecture because it is of a didactic quality that is clearly higher than a 'tutorial'.

I especially loved your solution to the problem with the knobs. Most people would figure that out after they had mounted it. BTT will upgrade their board to a v1.2 for that. But you had that 'vision'  And it looks much better than the version that I would have used, if I had spent so much money for a 7 inch screen to push 'print' / 'cancel' on

And yes, if it had not already been there, this post would have made me want to learn 3d design to design my own simple stuff.

Thanks!