From a conversation with a nice lady who dropped off a giant metal albatross for me to add electronics to that I’ve been working on in parallel with the Voron 0.2:
Me: I have an ungodly amount of different screws organized into little Akro Mills organizers and baggies and things.
Me: But, like, for the Voron 0 I need to get built so I can start retiring my current 3D printer, it’s mostly M3 screws, but it’s 10 different kinds.
Me: And until you’ve accepted McMaster Carr as your personal lord and savior, good luck finding the right screw.
Her: Yes they are amazingggg!
Her: I’m so glad you exposed me to McCarr
Me: There’s a joke to be made there about finding the best screw over the Internet.
Her: Lmao
ZeroFilter test-fitting
I realized that things were assembled far enough that I could test-fit some things and thus answer some questions about if I had enough nuts inserted in the extrusions. And, at least with the printer as I’ve got it assembled, the Kirigami bed seems to impact the ZeroFilter before it hits the endstop, so I’m concerned about how much room there would be. Coincidentally, most of the shots of the ZeroFilter show the various Zero mods that are so tantalizingly fun looking but I’m not doing yet because I want to build my printer.
Instead, it looks like there’s a side mount that holds the ZeroFilter upright that should give it more room, so that’s what I’ll make sure I have the screws for.
A Drive
- Conveniently, the parts for the A and B drive are roughly assembled which means that you do a little less hunting for parts.
- Other reviews commented on the spacer shim washers being of low quality. I’m using just a plain old pair of calipers but I’m measuring a fairly wide variation in height, plus they don’t look especially well fabricated. Conveniently other folks had mentioned this and so I’d gotten some rings from DFH and they seem to be a lot better such that every one I have is within the tolerance of the calipers to each other. I’m using the supplied washers as washers instead of shim washers where the instructions are just calling for a plain old washer. Coincidentally, while I was building the A/B drive, the same thing came up on the Voron discord as well.
- I’d gotten some bearings on an auspicious day in my spouse’s faith because I was planning on getting the zero but wasn’t ready to deal with building it so that I’d have the printer “started” on an auspicious day, so I used some in the A drive instead of the supplied bearings.
- Okay the manual says to use temporary nuts to keep the whole thing from falling apart but doesn’t say when I’m expected to take them off… so I left them on.
B Drive
- Second mount went much faster. Maybe I just need to build more Vorons?
A/B Drives
- Ah, now I know when the temporary nuts come off of the A and B drive!
- This is the first time I had to back up a bit. Not because I’d not preloaded a nut but because the preloaded nut I was using was bad and so I had to put a fresh nut in. Not sure if I used one of the kit nuts or if I used one of my existing nuts.
A/B Idlers
- On pg 84, it would help to denote which set is the A and B idlers, because I kinda had to extrapolate based on the pictures.
Z Axis
- Okay major confusion on the leadscrew nut. The way I’d assembled things using the Kirigami bed means that I already had the leadscrew nut already mounted on the bed, and I was hunting through the pile of printed parts starting to think that I’d lost my marbles and/or a key part.
- As I’m pre-loading a bunch more screws, I’m realizing it would be nice to have just a map of the extrusions and how many nuts they are supposed to have, in total, and what it’s for. It turns out that BallisticTech has a version of this.
- Also, I think this section of the manual is confusing, which is made worse by the Kirigami manual. The right thing, I think, to do would have been for the Kirigami manual to have you screw down the leadscrew nut when you are assembling the bed. I don’t like that the manual links to a video that explains how the leadscrew nut works because this feels like part of the actual assembly process… although the sourcing guide still calls the anti-backlash nut the “preferred” option. And then it’s drawing the anti-backlash nut as if the spring is somehow magically not about to spring all over the place.
- It turns out you need an absurd number of no-drop-nut sleeves. I keep thinking “Oh, this should be enough to hold me for the rest of the build” only to discover that there’s still more to go.
Feet
- I thought I was one MR85 bearing short. The extruder takes 2 and the filament sensor takes one more. There’s a canister containing the gear drive kit and there’s two MR85 bearings there. And then the baggie with the pre-wired filament sensor microswitch has a third MR85 bearing, which I didn’t notice. Oh, and then the BOM on the sourcing guide has it wrong. I’m digressing but I would love to see somebody work on the automation and workflow for the documentation and BOM management, understanding that’s an entirely different skillset than things like designing all of the other bits and also, to do it right, might involve doing battle with Fusion360.
- I’m not entirely sure if I’ve got the ECAS04 collet assembled properly? I’m also going to re-do how filament is fed to make it fit in my space anyways, however.
- The No Drop Nut is too wide for the screw that holds down the power entry foot, so I left one screw out.
- I am not installing the color accent pieces. The feet are printed out of ABS-GF and it’s connected with Phillips head self-tapping screws and after I screwed down two of them part way I decided this is a great way to never be able to disassemble the printer feet.
Z Axis - Leadscrew
- Looked at how the leadscrew was being mounted and realized that if I wanted to use the Voron V0.2 Electronics DIN Rail Bracket I needed to pre-load some nuts, so I took the feet off real quick and added 5 more nuts to each side.
- Okay, the whole leadscrew section really is a mess to follow along with. I had put the nut on upside-down, not sure how much that matters of course, so I had to disassemble it. And then to get the screws for the Z stepper in, you end up needing to use a pair of tweezers to drop them in and you definitely need a ball-head key to tighten them. There’s an open issue suggesting that it needs to be done earlier and maybe that’s right?
- Also, I suspect that there’s some interactions with the No Drop Nuts, probably because it’s holding the nut just a smidgen too far away to engage, so I switched the M3×8 screws with M3×10 screws for those parts.
Summary and future planning
A few other things meant that I had a bit of time with the printer sitting on it’s shelf and hadn’t gotten to doing much assembly.
I guess now it’s starting to be clear where a lot of the things go and, looking at the mods I’m planning on applying, where I need to make sure the screws are preloaded, etc. So I spent some time checking the DIN rail mounts, the ZeroFilter, etc.
The Z-axis install is actually the fiddliest part, at least partially because the community moved over to the Kirigami bed as the standard, but also because the manual is itself a bit confusing because it’s trying to accommodate the entire space of possibilities for a leadscrew nut.
And one of the problems with ABS-GF for all of the parts is that a M2 self-tapping screw is not super-excited about ABS-GF, especially the Philips screws that came with the Formbot kit.
I am pretty sure that I am going to end up re-doing the feet and skirt, either by just making my own darn design or because someone’s got one that looks nice and fits my needs. This is a Voron, after all. The primary problem, and one I don’t have a clear ready-made solution for, is that I’m not using the spool holder and I want to be able to swap spools without moving the printer forward on the shelf. I need to see how things are looking as I get closer to done to decide what my best version of filament feed and drybox location is going to be.