Box Turtle AFC Build

[bdejong11129]

I have had the kit sitting on my desk for a month or so and I am going to start it now that I finished the Voron 0.2 build(That was a blast). 

One of the parts that caused me a ton of anguish is this one. 

The box turtle logo kept breaking off on the 2.4 printers.  No matter how slow I printed they failed over and over.  In comes the Voron Zero!.  It prints it perfect, or near perfect every time.  So, I think the spoolers and extruders are going to be printed on the zero and larger parts on the 2.4s.  

If anyone has suggestions for settings to print this part, let me know.  Its been the bane of my turtle existence. 

 

[RS250Rw]

Love my Box Turtle.  You already said slow, which is key.  If you have not tuned flow for the filament you are using in a while, I would suggest doing it.  "Califlower" calibration tuning is well work the $$ to get everything else tuned, and proportional.  It made a world of difference in all my prints coming off my 2.4. Slicer settings I used in Orca that also made a difference.  Use "classic wall generation", not arachne, select "avoid crossing walls", and "inner/outer/inner" wall print order also helped.  YMMV but that is what helped me get some good lightboxes.

[bdejong11129]

I tune all my printers with the latest Califlower.  For some reason, the 2.4's could print it all day long in PLA but would knock off the turtle emblem every time.  However, printing them on the little V-0.2 they came out perfect, or at least close enough for me.  So I just printed them on that printer and let the larger one print the huge trays. 

[bdejong11129]

Progress so far. 

I ended up printing most of the parts on the new Voron 0.2, what a wonderful little printer.  Most everything fir in one way or the other except for the trays.  Those are being printed on the 2.4's.

I worked on building the extruders tonight and here they are.  The build went pretty smoothly with no real issues other than my top surface quality which I have been working on as I print replacement parts.   I ended up having to use some small hobby files to knock down the top surface to get the parts to fit nicely.  Everything is smooth. 

Here is an example, small but I want it to fit well and for some parts it matters. 

These are important to work with no binding. . 

So a little time spent knocking down the high spots made them work great. 

 

One thing for the extruders that I missed the first time assembling them is the tags for the length of the wires.  The small switch and the motors have to be matched based on the wire length specified on the box turtle docs.  I missed this on the first go-around and had to swap two of the motors. So pay attention to that, because I didnt....lol

Now I am waiting for a few re-prints for the turtle neck parts.  The little tube that takes the ECAS is braking when I press the ECAS fitting in.  I am removing the rubber bumper end.  I may need to fit these a bit so I am running a few off so I have spares.  Also drying some clear PETG for the diffuser parts of the re-spoolers. 

After that its learning how to print TPU for the tires.  Never printed TPU so this is a perfect reason to learn, lol. 

 

[mvdveer]

Good looking parts. It is a common issue that comes up - the cracking of parts when inserting the ECAS connector. Go slooooooowww. As long as your TPU is DRY, then there will not be major issues. One thing though - Stringing - still have not mastered that on TPU

[claudermilk]

TPU is really hard to print. I still haven't gotten to a good tune on that. I've printed a few functional parts, but they were ugly as heck.

On your top surface, it looks a bit overextruded. The Ellis tuning guide covers tuning EM which might be the culprit. I'd also look at top layer bead width and speed.

[bdejong11129]

Extruders are done. Most of the way through the respoolers.  I had to reprint the gears a few times while adjusting flow to get the right fit on the shaft. First ones were a bit loose. Got a nice tight press fit on the third set.  I figured these needed to be tight.

Off camping for a week so project is paused.  

 

[bdejong11129]

So today was TPU day, I have never printed it before, so this was a fun little distraction from other stuff going on.  I started with the generic profile in Orca slicer, and the first edit was to slow it down.  I am printing these on my little Voron 0.2 and used 20mm/sec as a starting point.   This first thing I had to resolve was making the filament feed path super smooth.  If I used the mounted one on the back it didn't seem to want to feed it in correctly.   I printed a ball bearing mount for my multiboard and that thing has zero resistance.  The Filament falls off pretty easily.  This as well seemed to introduce little gaps when the spool weight was being tugged on.  In the end I just pulled off a bunch and let it drape over the table in order to get the "tires" printed. 

A few things that I noticed as I tuned these in. 

1. I was able to push to 30mm/s for first layer and 50mm/s for all other options with no issues.  Probably could have gone faster but maybe later on. 
2. The seam position setting was important.  Since these are nice circles and I printed them one at a time I wanted to minimize the strings.  I ended up with the following settings that resulted in pretty good parts.  Most of the setting were related to the seam position as I wanted to minimize and stringing. I ran with zero retraction since I didn't want to tune that in at this time.  230degree extruder and 40 degree build plate.  I did use Magigoo as a release agent. 
   1. 

The parts look like this which I feel are perfectly acceptable for a tire on a spooler. 

 

I am reprinting some of the early versions so that they are all at least of the same quality.  As you can see, from right to left they did get better.  The ones on the right are from earlier settings before I landed on the correct seam and filament path. 

 

Now I am just slugging through the printing of the trays.  They are so big that they keep warping, even with plenty of adhesion aids.  I have some other filament on the way in the same color in case I just get tired of fighting the ASA warping issues.  I don't plan on enclosing it right away so I could at least get it done with PETG or PLA for now.  I mean, its skirts and trays so ABS may not be absolutely necessary for open air tuning and testing. 

 

[bdejong11129]

I did end up reprinting the tires from the earlier attempts.  They all look like the ones on the left.  I know they may have worked but I just didn't like the looks of them, lol.

[Savate]

On 8/28/2025 at 12:11 AM, bdejong11129 said:

They are so big that they keep warping, even with plenty of adhesion aids

with a clean pei (hot water with dishwashing liquid), a good chamber temp (greater than 45° at print start) and a fine z offset you should not experience any warping with these trays.

printed them with old remaining esun abs+ without any problems. 

 

[bdejong11129]

So here is a honest update, lol.   I have been working on assembly of the individual parts and realized that I need to print a bunch of them over.  A few posts back I highlighted some issues with the top layer of my prints.  Remember, some of these were printed on my recently built V0.2.  I worked for a day on adjusting my calibration and got the top surface dialed in.  I reprinted a few parts and the fit and function are much better.  Its hard at time to scrap a bunch of parts and start over but I think its the right thing to do for some of them.  

For example, the turtleneck, the newly printed parts resulted in a very smooth operation.  While the previous version would work, the new ones work better.  So I am going to reprint the parts that are effected the most from the top surface and just get it done right.  

Plus, I broke one of those odd microswitches while validating the fit of the hub so I have a week to wait while Digikey delivers the replacement. 

[mvdveer]

23 minutes ago, bdejong11129 said:

So here is a honest update, lol.   I have been working on assembly of the individual parts and realized that I need to print a bunch of them over.  A few posts back I highlighted some issues with the top layer of my prints.  Remember, some of these were printed on my recently built V0.2.  I worked for a day on adjusting my calibration and got the top surface dialed in.  I reprinted a few parts and the fit and function are much better.  Its hard at time to scrap a bunch of parts and start over but I think its the right thing to do for some of them.  

For example, the turtleneck, the newly printed parts resulted in a very smooth operation.  While the previous version would work, the new ones work better.  So I am going to reprint the parts that are effected the most from the top surface and just get it done right.  

Plus, I broke one of those odd microswitches while validating the fit of the hub so I have a week to wait while Digikey delivers the replacement. 

Will be more than worth it in the end. Will save you a lot of headaches later when it comes to tuning.

[bdejong11129]

The part that benefitted the most was the turtle neck.  It had a few spots where it was "sticky' but after getting the top surface under control its smooth as butter now.  

I have been trying out the new version of flow calibration in Orca Slicer.  It does seem to work, the new circle method takes a bit to get used to but once you get it to go away the top surface is improved.  One of the things I noticed was that my first layer was not quite right.  I am using a Euclid probe with auto-z and it took a little bit of an adjustment in the offset for the end-stop to get the first layer to squish correctly.  For that I just placed a square primitive and dropped the z-height to 4 layers and had it cover about 75% of the bed.  This allowed me to watch the first layer go down, make adjustments and watch to make sure it worked better or not.  I usually don't let it go past the first layer but having it so big helped me ensure I go it dialed in.   This should be something to add to the calibration menu.