I ended up on a few side-quests while doing this.
See, I want the inverted electronics mod. The key part of the mod is, of course, the brackets that flip the DIN rails upside down. But also you have modified Z stepper motor mounts that don’t grip the panel anymore. Except those are going to get hot and so they really needed to be printed out of ASA, so that provided the final push for me to get my Zero printing high-temperature materials which led off on a few more side quests.
Then I had to switch gears to wrap up a project that a nice lady has been waiting on me to finish.
And then I had the soldering iron out and decided to just read forward in the manual and put in a bunch of heat-set inserts before I continued, such that I wouldn’t need to pause my assembly process to add any more heat-sets.
Y Axis
The frame is pretty flexy. I spent a bunch of time squaring the frame at the start but even though I got things fairly tight, everything worked itself loose and so pretty much everything has fallen out of square, just from moving it around to get the right working angle.
As I’d written previously, you can get a HCJ5 screw joint that will make the blind joints keyed. There’s also the keyed Mismui corner cubes.
I got some aftermarket 2020 nuts and it turns out they are also pretty annoying. I got one batch of M5 nuts will actually pop in mostly OK, but the M3 nuts from the same manufacturer won’t and the M5 and M3 nuts that I got also won’t. All of the nuts, including the out-of-spec ones that came with the printer, work perfectly well if you put them in pre-assembly.
Getting enough actual drop-in nuts from Misumi USA adds up fast, BTW.
Furthermore, I thought I had a reasonable rule to sort out the extrusions but it turns out that I was wrong.
I was thinking that it felt weird to not have a laundry list of things to preload ahead of time, given that I built a Zero first, but I think the easiest road forward is to just treat it as a Zero and preload a bunch of nuts.
While I was disassembling it, I realized that the orientation of the T-nuts that they show in the manual is important. If you orient them as the manual suggests it tends to result in the screw holes being exactly where you think they ought to be, which is helpful.
I’m also adding some right-angle 2020 extrusion reinforcements and corner brackets for 2020 extrusions to some corners where it looks like I can get away with it.
So I squared the whole thing all over again. With the added bracing, now I can rotate it to get the right angle without worrying about things going out of square. I’ll see how it works out and remove them later on if they get in the way.
Z Axis
- In order to do the inverted electronics mod, I’ve gotta slipstream in the modified stepper mounts.
- Missed 4x M5 T-nuts in my pre-loading binge but thankfully the M5 nuts I got are actually fairly happy being jammed in there.
- While assembling the three Z joints, it just says to put an M5 nut in there, except that it’s going to just fall out if I do that. I read forwards and it looks like eventually an M5x16 bolt goes through there, so I’ll add that now so that the nut doesn’t go flying.
- Also missed some nuts on the skirt. What I ended up needing to do is thread a bolt into the nut and kinda yank it around.
I wanted to get to the end of the Z axis section. It was a bit tricky getting to the end of the chapter but I guess it was either defeat or the feet.
Conclusion
- There’s several large projects that are blocked on account of not having a full-sized printer, so I really really want this done.
- The frame is really flexy with the thing partially assembled even with some braces added.
- At this point, with the feet on, I can now look and think and decide just how badly I want a 300mm Z axis or if I should stick to the 250mm.