Not A Voron

[Penatr8tor]

Yeah, having fun taking my time. It's a super fun build. Not difficult at all but... things have to be square as you already know. The 123 Blocks were also used to make the frame square. They can be clamped in place with quick clamps and once everything is set you crank down the screws. I can't recommend getting a pair enough.

 

[Penatr8tor]

Well... I think this is a good stopping point for the night. Got the lead screw all dialed in. X axis stepper is mounted. I just stuck the top cap and X Idler in place until tomorrow. Not too much left on the actual building end of things. Need to get the tool head built and mounted. Need to run the X axis belt and then it's on to the electronics and the enclosure. Hope to be printing by this time tomorrow. It's really starting to look like a printer.

[smirk]

10 hours ago, Penatr8tor said:

The 123 Blocks were also used to make the frame square. They can be clamped in place with quick clamps and once everything is set you crank down the screws. I can't recommend getting a pair enough

You should add them to the Buid Tools Mega List as a good suggestion.

[Penatr8tor]

Welp... Not a bad day, a few distractions but that's just normal. The focus for today was to get the tool head completed. The kit came with a Phaetus Dragonfly hotend, Bondtech LGX Lite extruder (can't wait to try out this little gem, I may have to get another one for the 2.4) pinda probe and your basic assortment of micro limit switches, fans, etc. Everything mechanical is completed on the printer, screws tightened and checked, pulleys are loctited, belts tensioned, lead screw adjusted and so on. Obviously, I still need to bundle and route wires and build the electronics enclosure. So that's next. Gonna build the little box and fill it with PCB's and wires.

I think this is a good time to talk about how the build went up to this point. The toolhead assembly design could use some refinement. Granted my kit came with 2.4 or 2.5 version of the toolhead (they call it EVA) and I know there's a 3.0 version but this is their production release and that's what it came with so that's what is on there. Without question... the nut pockets are a pain. Some were really tight, some were too loose, some in between. Too many times I found myself having to find a creative way of pushing against a nut because it was a little on the loose side, walked away from the surface it was supposed to be against and the screw reach. Other times I thought I had tightened something only to find the nut wasn't fully seated. Some of these nuts are buried a good 1.5-2 inches into a pocket and you have no idea where it bottoms out.  If it were me... I'd replace the nut pockets with heat set inserts at the very least on the tool head. There's just a whole lot of stuff going on in that assembly and inserts would make things a lot nicer to put together. From the little bit that I researched... it looks like the 3.0 toolhead has moved over to inserts and is designed to be easier to assemble. Here's a link to the 2.5 EVA toolhead build instructions if you want to take a look. https://ratrig.dozuki.com/Guide/07.+EVA+Assembly/117

 

[mvdveer]

2 hours ago, Penatr8tor said:

(they call it EVA)

I have the EVA 2 on my VZBOT with the LGX extruder. Printing without a hiccup so far. Agree the recessed hex nuts is a pain.

 

 

There is now a heat insert version on the webpage: https://main.eva-3d.page

 

 

 

[Penatr8tor]

Yeah, I saw that when I was doing "wait for shipping" research. I decided in the end to go with the one that was in the kit. Eventually I want to put a rapido on it and that will be a good time to upgrade to the latest. I've never used the dragonfly hotend, I would assume it's similar to the dragon HF I was running.

[atrushing]

4 hours ago, Penatr8tor said:

I've never used the dragonfly hotend

I have been using the Dragonfly exclusively for a while now. I was using the CHT nozzle with them but I kept getting clogging. Back with the stock nozzle I am printing at 120mm/s without any issues and over 400 hours print time (plus all the time to print Voron parts on my old Prusa).

[atrushing]

On 11/20/2022 at 12:22 AM, Penatr8tor said:

Yeah, having fun taking my time. It's a super fun build.

Curse You!!

If my wife complains that I'm building another printer then I'll have to say "don't blame me! @Penatr8tor made me do it.."

[Penatr8tor]

OK, Time to close out this build and stick the proverbial fork in it 'cause it's done...

The drama continues LOL.

So, I now understand why every 3D Print content creator is complaining about the wiring part of the build. I'll start by praising the RatRig team on their build guide, the mechanical assembly instructions are great. Nice, easy to follow and covers everything, absolutely no guess work with the first 80%. After that... you get one page with a wiring diagram. It's as if the task of creating a wiring guide was just abandoned by the team. So, OK, I get it, they're probably busy so I'll adapt and move forward. Well, I hate to say it but the issues with wiring don't stop there. The endstop power and ground wires for on the controller board connector are flipped and if you miss the warning and just plug them in the way they come, the controller is fried... Really? I mean this is beyond stupid IMO and the thing is... A year has gone by and no one has even bothered to fix this. And then there's a number of other things that just add to the frustration. The Weho power supply fan just runs at 100%, all the time and is super annoying. Meanwell replacement with load/temp controlled fan is already ordered and on the way. Powering the Pi 3A was also neglected by the RR team. The way they have it, you need to connect a USB charger to it. So initially I had a power cord and a USB cable plugged into the electrical box. A $5 24V -> 5V buck converter and a piece of double sided foam tape would have solved the problem. Stepper cables... At least these had the correct wires in the correct place but wait... the stupidity doesn't end there... Nope... you need to to cut off the DuPont connectors and crimp on the proper JST connectors. For the mains wiring they give you 5 crimp on female spade lugs. What? No lugs for the power supply? I mean really. So maybe I shouldn't be so hard on them, it is a kit after all and not every kit is perfect except, and I hope they fix this, their only competition ( a company that designs, sources and sells their own kits) Prusa... sells a 100% complete kit where you don't have to order a bunch of stuff mid build. I think the reason why Prusa kits are as good as they are because Prusa actually sells completely assembled printers in addition to kits. When you build production units, your mfg team figures out what length the wires need to be, what parts last or work best, etc, etc. and when it comes time to kit everything up for the hobbyist the wants to do their own build... the components are pulled from the same stock they use to manufacture the unit in house. The RatRiggers only sell kits. They don't have to build their own kits... we do.

OK, End of Rant!!!

After excessively complaining to my friends about the wiring... I got to setting up the printer. It consisted of the usual Stepper Buzzing and Z-Offsetting, bed leveling stuff. I opted to go with RatOS variant instead of raw Klipper and ya know... It's pretty F'n awesome and I'm glad I did. So... I have the all the steppers, endstops, etc. configured and I go to Height Map and do a bed mesh. Measuring from the center of the bed... the Y axis is good and has acceptable variation in height. The X axis is another story. X=0 is -0.4mm and X=180 is +1.1mm. That's 1.5mm across the X Axis. Apparently my use the infamous 123 blocks has failed me. So I loosen up the X extrusion bracket and try my best to get is parallel with the bed. Further probing ends up netting me a 1.1mm improvement with a total variation of 0.4mm end to end. I will shim the bed to get it as close as I can in the future. Now I'm like... That's still enough to gouge a nice groove in the PEI sheet so I'm going to need to implement a med mesh when printing. I do a bunch of research to learn about the process because I don't need to run bed mesh and haven't on my 2.4. I know I need to have a mesh loaded and the feature turned on so I start looking for the print_start macro to see what I need to add. I find it and it's like 100 lines long and I'm like WOW... look at all this stuff it's doing and what the hell is a prime blob because that's in there too. Based on my decades of experience I say... Fuc-it... I load the generic V-Minion profile in SuperSlicer, slice a cube, upload it to RatOS, load some PLA and hit the print button. Here's what happens next... The printer first homes, parks the head in the center and heats the bed to whatever I had set it to in SS. Once the bed is hot... the nozzle heats to 150c and after it's hot the printer does a 5x5 bed mesh. Once the mesh is done it heats the nozzle to print temp. Once the nozzle is hot, the head move to the front right corner and parks the nozzle about .5mm above the bed and it extrudes a blob of filament, as the blob grows it slowly raises the nozzle to create a Hershey's Kiss like blob, it then moves the Y about 20mm creating a bridge, then as it's extruding and moving along the Y the nozzle lowers to 1st layer height to create a 10mm strip. It then does a quick move to end the prime strip and moves on to printing. After 40 min's or so... it printed a near perfect cube. Needless to say I was blown away. Below are images of of the wiring, Yes it's a RatRigs Nest LOL. I have plans for a better more organized electronics enclosure in the future because that's the "REAL" reason we build printers... So that we can mod them afterwards.

Pi and SKR 2 mounted.

 

Panels in place.

 

Jumpers configured for UART

 

Mains wiring

 

Tool head routing

 

The RatRig Nest

 

All buttoned up and ready to print.

 

Test prints

This Cube was printed @ 250mm/s w/ 10000 acceleration. Obviously that's not the average, probably more like 180-200 but we can compare print times. Stock V-Minion PLA settings it printed in 55 minutes. This printed in 20 minutes. So pretty good quality for the speed. Also there's a close up of the Prime Blob. You can see where it printed the bridge section and the ramp down to print height. I really like this feature over my standard prime strip. I'm going to steal this g-code and load it into my Voron print start macro.

In closing... It's been a fun build and even though I bitched about the wiring... it really wasn't that bad. I would encourage anyone with decent hands on skills that's new to building a printer to build a Prusa...  Even though this kit is easy to build from a mechanical standpoint... the lack of guidance with the electrical part raises the skill level requirements above what the newb could, IMO, easily handle.

[atrushing]

33 minutes ago, Penatr8tor said:

It's been a fun build and even though I bitched about the wiring... it really wasn't that bad.

It turned out great! Now I have a decent idea of what to look forward to. I only ordered the mechanical kit plus flexplate. I guess I'll watch Nero's build to prepare for the electronics phase.

[Penatr8tor]

20 minutes ago, atrushing said:

It turned out great! Now I have a decent idea of what to look forward to. I only ordered the mechanical kit plus flexplate. I guess I'll watch Nero's build to prepare for the electronics phase.

Looking back with more knowledgeable eyes... The electronics really isn't that difficult. If you buy LDO motors and they come with cables... these are the ones in the kit andI believe there are plug and play cables available. You definitely need to buy the Honey Badger heater from Fabreeko and I'd go so far as to say, get the 2 endstop switches whiles you're at it, unless you're going sensorless homing. BTW those motors and the SKR2 board will do that. I watched all of the videos from Nero3D, Modbot and Vector3D. Each gives a unique perspective that will allow you to take away something valuable. Since you're going to end up printing your own parts... Vector3D has ASA/ABS optimized parts on his Github as well as the Z top cap that uses the bowden collar that was removed from the hotend. Pretty smart actually. I have the mod installed in the picture with all the parts on the print bed.

 

 

[atrushing]

1 minute ago, Penatr8tor said:

You definitely need to buy the Honey Badger heater from Fabreeko

I live in Europe so I just emailed Keenovo and they are making me a 180W-240V heater to match the V-Minion spec. They were very quick to reply and easy to work with! For the motors I'm going with ones from StepperOnline. They are pin compatible with LDO motors with the same torque rating.

I think I'll run the reverse bowden from below the spool like on a V0.1 because it's easier to hide. I didn't know about V3D's optimized parts so I'm glad I didn't start printing parts!

Right now I'm trying to get my Mini SB to fit on the RatRig MGN12 mount system. I also want to figure out a minimal (hopefully removable) enclosure.

[Penatr8tor]

29 minutes ago, atrushing said:

I live in Europe so I just emailed Keenovo and they are making me a 180W-240V heater to match the V-Minion spec.

I think you mean 24V. 

As for the toolhead... there's nothing wrong with the RatRig design. Well, nothing too wrong LOL. The EVA 2.4 that I have has weak points where the part cooling fan connects and a couple other areas. The 3.0 version solves all of that. I would stick with the Prusa style Pinda Probe as it works extremely well. I also wanted to mention just how nice the LGX Lite extruder is. If I had a choice at the time I would have gone LGX LIte with Rapido hotend instead of the Dragonfly. But that's what it came with and that's good enough. For now... Hahahaha

[atrushing]

4 minutes ago, Penatr8tor said:

weak points where the part cooling fan connects

I liked your rubber band solution to secure the part cooling fan!

5 minutes ago, Penatr8tor said:

I think you mean 24V. 

I am using a line voltage heater with an SSR so that I can get away with a smaller 24V power supply. Also, I am using the BTT Manta M4P with their CB1 so I won't have to worry about the 5V power supply either.

I'm sure their EVA toolhead is great but I like the Stealthburner looks and the toolhead lighting. Plus I am designing  a modified HextrudORT and I need to install it on something so that I can properly test it! I do have an extra Pinda probe, I just need to figure out where it will fit.

[Penatr8tor]

3 hours ago, atrushing said:

I liked your rubber band solution to secure the part cooling fan!

Yeah... Nothing is more permanent than a temporary fix that works. And never underestimate the power of rubber bands and duct tape. 

I'm interested in seeing what you come up with for your extruder.

[smirk]

11 hours ago, Penatr8tor said:

Nothing is more permanent than a temporary fix that works

In my line of work we call that a proto-duction (or if you're particularly cynical "standard practice")

[atrushing]

Monkey see

Monkey do...

[Penatr8tor]

Nice! Congrats @atrushing. Best of luck on the build and we want to see your progress so... Build Diary buddy. 

A word of advice... the Nut pockets and zip tie channels are on the tight side. Test them out before building. I had a few nut sockets that needed opening up and some of the zip tie slots were too tight to use.

And I like the color. Should look really cool once you get it done.

p.s. My meanwell power supply came yesterday and I swapped out the Weho. So much nicer now.

[atrushing]

45 minutes ago, Penatr8tor said:

Best of luck on the build and we want to see your progress so... Build Diary buddy. 

Thanks. I'm still waiting on parts and it will be a slow build but I will share the process.

47 minutes ago, Penatr8tor said:

A word of advice... the Nut pockets and zip tie channels are on the tight side. Test them out before building.

I am using the files from AdamV3D and I have a set of reamers that have come in very handy. I'll find a way to make everything fit

[smirk]

1 hour ago, Penatr8tor said:

. Build Diary buddy.

I'll second @Penatr8tor

[Penatr8tor]

Ha HA! I'm back... One of the first orders of business I had, once I had the printer up and running, was to upgrade the hotend to a Rapido. Not that the Dragonfly isn't an OK hotend it just not the one I like, plus I already had some flow related issues printing on the fast side. One of the other things I wanted to implement but wanted to make sure is whether this printer was worth the upgrade/s or not. It is and I love it so let's upgrade the entire print head assembly to the new EVA 3.0 print head. I can reuse all of the fans and, probes, extruders and stuff so why not print up some new parts (that use heat set inserts instead of nut pockets this time) and get everything ready. So here we are... On the cusp of another adventure. Tally Ho!

 

[smirk]

That looks very pretty!

[Penatr8tor]

Just now, smirk said:

That looks very pretty!

I know right... I got another post coming detailing how I printed the shroud. Darn German in me always makes me spell shroud like schroud.  It schucks I tell ya.