We had an ice storm yesterday, and I realized that I do, in fact, have smooth rods. They're just tied up in my acrylic framed printer. I actually have a fair amount of them, so I was able to work off of this design: And thus, the product of yesterday: Currently, it seems to have a build area of ~180x180mm, which is horribly offset (the orange square). The constraint is that moving the smooth rails outwards causes the pulleys for the drive line to collide with the frame. Fixing that is easy, but fixing it in a way that doesn't add a huge amount of volume (and print time) to the corner pieces is still elusive for me. I'm discovering I kinda like doing CAD stuff so long as I'm using OpenSCAD. FreeCAD is easy to use, but I never learned to use it in a way that didn't screw you over if you needed to go back and change something you did at the beginning.
This is pretty rad. I work in fabrication and love seeing stuff like this. You from last week: What's your use goal? I'm not sure what units you've used, but there's a definitely a visible difference between the Delta printers it looks like you're tooling around with and, say, a 3D45. Not that there's anything wrong with that, especially considering price point - I'm just curious what your usage is.My bet is that most printers are vastly overbuilt in the name of precision that won't really be visible anyways after the sloppy process of spitting out molten plastic.
Thanks! I don't really know what I'm doing. I was thinking of the sort of middle to lower tier builds I see on reprap.org where people are building for hobbiest or home use, and running $15 rolls of PLA through it. Right now, I have a secondhand i3 clone with a cracked acrylic frame, worn out bushings, and zip-tie secured linear rails. Objectively, it is a steaming pile but it works ok. The belt pulleys on it don't even have bearings, they just rotate on a screw. The z axis lead screws wobble all over the place. On the one hand, improving on it should be pretty easy. On the other hand,the thing already is capable of producing reliable interfaces for my camera's lens mount and hood rings. I'm still figuring out the best workflow for designing stuff. I've gravitated to mocking the whole thing up roughly in blender, and then fiddling in openscad until it works like mockup.What's your use goal? I'm not sure what units you've used, but there's a definitely a visible difference between the Delta printers it looks like you're tooling around with and, say, a 3D45. Not that there's anything wrong with that, especially considering price point - I'm just curious what your usage is.