I have been building my printer for a few months now, named the C1 Din.



I been watching this thread as the C bot was the initial start of my build, and I wanted to chime in when the direct extruder talk happened, and I thought oh I'll wait til I have some test prints, and now with the cyber Monday sale going on at open builds, I felt like I should at least let the news out that I have some, alterations, that may address the rigidity problems people have talked about.

On the right is the C bot XY Motor mount, on the left is the C1 Din.





The C1 Din has an internal volume of nearly 700mm to enclose a multi size bed platform system that accommodates a large print platform of 425mmx425mm, a small print platform of 214x214. This was done to keep the running costs lower when only printing a small object.



The shear size of the system is very heavy, and since I wanted this to be a very high quality print machine, I opted for a dual ball screw Z axis. With nema 23s driving them, there won't be any problems raising and lowering the bed and any monstrosity printed on top of it.





The space around the platform is for a circulation system for the heated chamber system housed under the main upper print area, and the same system will double as an excavation ventilation system when the print is finished so you can route a hose out a window for ABS or other smelly filaments once the heat is no longer needed for the print. A 50A 24 power supply powers everything, and a new 32 bit controller, Replicape, controls everything Replicape - a smart and silent controller board for 3D printers



The hot end will be a magnetized changing system, with either a single water cooled e3dv6, or a quad kraken. I am not too sure if I have a need for quad, but I made sure the printer was sized to hold 4 rolls of filament if needed. The direct drive single extruder motor and the hot end will both be put on a water loop that is cooled be either a dual or triple 45mm alphacool radiator. I designed a direct drive that I feel is much better than the currently suggested C bot direct drive, as the filament never leaves the bowden tube. filament would be guided inside a tube like a bowden, but it feeds into the top of the direct drive mk8 that is pushing it down all the while the filament never leaves the tube; it's only notched for the mk8 to push the filament it on its way down the tube and into the hot end. I based my design off a mix of the suggested c bot direct drive and with the LulzBot Flexystruder LulzBot TAZ Flexystruder Tool Head v2 | LulzBot. I have two models atm, one with it mounted on a magnetic carriage, and one on a eccentric full v wheel (not mini) carriage.



The reason I wanted to share my printer now here instead of branching it before it was finished was to share my much improved stiffening of the chassis. all of my carriages use full solid extreme v wheels (not mini) so my stls from there even I cant share for c bot builders. So.. I am unsure if much of anything I've build would be of much use to a standard C bot. Anyone who wanted them would need to basically redesign their whole printer, including purchasing more/different extrusion if they based their system off the original.

The .stl are still being revised daily; I'm printing them daily, modeling them daily, and tweaking them, so this is still a very in the middle of design phase, but if anyone is interested in them and/or has suggestions, I'd love to hear it now and than I could release some stable versions of things once I have my printer buttoned together.

---tldr--

Also, is anyone interested in the beefed up supports, my extruder, or any other part of the C1? Anyone want to reverse engineer them for the C bot?

My first post, don't mean to steal any C bot thunder or the thread; just thought I share here since I was inspired here and it may be of some help!

 

Where are you located?

 

Just started the with xy-movement.
Everything fits perfect but after all wheels are mounted the beam is quite hard to move (no hotend mounted yet)
It's a bit hard to quantify but roughly the same amount of force is needed to push the xy-beam as moving an office chair with wheels.

I suspect that the wheels are pushing quite hard against the beam and causes this.

What kind of force do you need to move the xy-beam?

 

Do you have the belts installed and tightened? The xy beam should move by hand with some resistance if the belts are on and tightened. If belts are not in place yet then the xy beam and the print carriage should move fairly smoothly and easily.

 

Thanks!
I have not installed the belts yet so I'm guessing my idlers are somewhat too small...

 

The two lower holes on each xy idler piece and the print carriage have slots with slanted faces to allow the wheel axel bolts to move up and down to adjust the amount of tension against the linear rail. It takes some trial and error and adjustment to get all four wheels to hold onto the rail with a good amount of tension. Before that, make sure your left and right upper rails are as parallel as possible.

 

Utah, United States

 

My condolences.

What is it you are looking to get printed? I might have some time I could do some for you.

p.s. I lived in Provo/Orem for awhile myself.

 

lol, Utah is a good place most of the time. I want to get a full set of parts printed for this build, then I also want to get 24x 20mm Extrusion Corner Bracket by Atomist printed and 60 x M5 nut holder for 10 series t-slot aluminum extrusion by Thump2010 . I'm willing to pay no problem for the parts.

 

Is that a concentricity gauge on your print head? It looks like the one I use on my lathe.

 

It is a dial indicator (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000NPPBVK?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o08_s00) I use for leveling the bed. It comes off before printing.

 

A good alternative to plastic nut holders is square nuts, they fit in the Vslot and they are just narrow enough to be inserted into the face of the rail also.
M53065 - M5X.8 Square Nut Steel 4 Zinc DIN562 (Rohs Compliant)

 

Those are a lot cheaper than the drop in T-Nuts. Might add some to my next MrMetric order.

 

Awesome thank you! I will take that into account. Much less expensive tahn the tslots they sell

 

Sounds exciting. The only substractive manufacturing I have on my desk is a couple chisels I never get around to putting away.

So on another topic. I got a deal on a sheet of Mic-6 hanging around too long in the back of a metal shop. They gave me the whole thing cause no one else was buying and really who would want to cut it down.

Is moving up to a 320mm x 430mm x 700mm starting to push the limits of 2040 extrusions? Is there A) a point (other than just design greed) and B) A limitation that I'm going to be running into that I might not be foreseeing?

Any opinions would be great, especially all of you with the who have started building big.

 

Question: Do you mean you can slide them straight into the face of the v-slot? Like, if the ends are capped, you can sneak them in that way?

 

Yes, it depends on the tolerance of each nut but I find that it works more often than not. I've been using them as drop-ins on my build and in place of regular Tnuts.

 

OHHHh..... nice! Going to get some right now!

 

Might be worth noting that the bolt lengths will have to be more accurate as the difference between the minimum (where first threads engage) and maximum lengths (where the bolt bottoms out onto the inside of the extrusion wall) will be smaller with these nuts.

T-nuts normally have a longer thread that pokes between the v-rails to the outer edge of the extrusion, allowing you to use a slightly shorter bolt.

 

After a month I finally got around to hooking up my heated bed. The result seems worse than using the room temp glass bed.
It seems like the lower areas with slight overhang are being over-softened by the heat from the bed possibly?
Should the heated bed even be used for parts this small?

PLA, Extruder at 200C
Before-Hairspray on glass 25C
After-Hairspray on glass 60C
Print fan turns on after layer 3

Any ideas are appreciated, thanks.

 

I'm really interested in what you come up with to resolve this as it is a problem I have been dealing with on another printer for some time. Might have to try a print with the bed off and see if it makes a difference.

 

60 for PLA might be warm, I did my last PLA print at 50, it was the LeFabCar, and has some similar problems. In my case I found out that when I change filaments through the LCD pasue and filament jog, my part cooling fan turned off, and didn't resume when the print resumed.

 

The gantry stiffening mod is pretty much a must-do for the xcarve. I think they're shipping the dewalt router as the default spindle now? If not and you got the tiny spindle you're going to want to upgrade that pretty quick. Also I'd not run it anywhere near your 3D printer, wood dust on the filament will clog your nozzle.

 

Note, I don't heat my 12x12" bed at all for PLA. Slather a 1:1 solution of woodglue and water on there, touch it up with hairspray from time to time, it works pretty well. Sometimes I add a brim to parts, just in case.

 

I thought that might be the answer. I've printed a dozen or so parts on the cold bed so far and had good results but none of them had a very big footprint, on larger stuff I started to see slight warping

 

Ironically (?), big prints for me stick way better than small ones: When I printed the big reindeer, I had no problem with the four legs sticking, each about an inch across: I had to really pry it off of there. Same goes for the eiffel tower legs. I then tried printing a smaller reindeer where the leg touchpoint was 1/4" across, and I had a few instances where they'd get knocked over by the head-travel. Giving it a raft (which I generally loath) fixed it right up though, since the raft was glued on there nice and good. Here's a timelapse of the tiny-reindeer showing that:

 

What timelapse settings are you using?

 

Well. Did an experiment with that overhang issue. Modified a gcode file to remove the heated bed setting. Here are before and after pictures...



Both items were printed on BuildTak surface.

The one on left was printed with the heated bed at 60C with no surface prep other than cleaning.. The one on the right was done with the bed at room temperature with a coating of extra hold hairspray. So, don't think I will be using the heat part of the heated bed for PLA prints in the future.

 

Via Octoprint, I have the cam set to take pics on z-height change, and set the "Timelapse Bitrate" to 10000k, whatever that means (I think it was 5000k to start, and the resultant quality was not so good). Externally configured the Raspberry Pi cam to record at 720p.

 

Are you doing any Z lifts on moves? It has been awhile since I have tried time lapse based on Z height change and it seems like when I did, it would take a picture when it was just a Z lift for movement, and not a layer change.