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Yes, I know I’ve been a little bit quiet on here to the point where I haven’t posted in over a month. I’ve been fairly busy with home life (visiting friends on weekends etc) and working away from home in different parts of the country.

I’ve also been working on the design for a new 3D printer. As some of the more regular readers will know, I have/had an Anycubic Linear Plus (ALP) and an Anycubic Predator. Both with a number of upgrades, with the main one being duet 2 control boards. Well the ALP has been sold and I bought a Da Vinci Jr 1.0 for £35 + postage off ebay to tinker with.

The main reason I sold the ALP was to generate funds for a new printer. A coreXY in fact, with built in toolchanger. I was blown away with the possibilities of the E3D toolchanger when I was TCT but the ~£3000 asking price almost made me fall over (I was also impressed by the E3D Hermes and needed an excuse to buy a duet 3). Since then I’ve been researching different toolchanging printers (shout out to the Jubilee printer) to see which design I liked. I knew my next printer was going to be a coreXY and I knew I wanted something a little larger and I couldn’t really find anything I liked.

So Jays Toolchanger CoreXY was born. If anyone comes up with a better name, please let me know in the comments below.

I had a few design goals in mind. Namely I wanted to print roughly 500x500x500, use the duet 3 with toolboards, be fully direct drive and to use as many 3d printed or off the shelf parts as possible (as it stands at the moment, only the locking pin and bed need to be custom machined, although once the locking plate is easily available, I will swap to machined ones).

All files are currently available on Github and Thingiverse and comments on the design are welcome. I have tried to make it as accessible as possible. All of the design work is done in Solidworks.

As it’s all the rage these days, there is also a discord server. Come join me for a chat.

I will add another post with build progress.

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I’ve always fancied upgrading one of my machines to a volcano hot end. Both of my deltas currently run genuine E3D v6 but as I slowly tweak them and increase the print speeds, my limiting factor will be how quickly I can heat up the plastic to squirt it out.

Hence the reason why E3D created the volcano (and super volcano – but why?? Just look at one).

Being a bit stingy, taking an interest in titanium heat breaks and also in non aluminium heated block (think brass or copper) I started to look around for alternatives.

That’s when I stumbled on TCMUK-3D and their titanium heat break and volcano upgrade kit. The kit is available directly from them here or through amazon here.

In the kit you get the following items.

  • Either a 40w or 60w heater cartridge in either 12v or 24v with extension cable (I went for a 60w 24v one).
  • A thermistor with extension cable (more on this later).
  • A titanium heat break
  • 3 x Stainless Steel Nozzles (0.6mm, 0.8mm and 1.0mm).
  • 3 x Brass Nozzles (0.6mm, 0.8mm and 1.0mm).
  • The required fixings.
  • An allen key.
  • Thermal paste.

Assembly is via the normal E3D assembly instructions.

Now this is the only negative thing I have to say about this kit. The thermistor is, well, rubbish. It doesn’t really conform to any current thermistors in marlin (although they suggest you use number 5 as its closest) and I’ve not had great success in the reprap firmware. They provided me with a copy of the datasheet but that didn’t really help. So my word of warning is use a different thermistor or buy a PT1000.

I am waiting on a new thermistor to come but in the mean time I have battled on with getting it to print as it is, althought not being 100% sure of the temperature I’m printing with. Below are a couple of examples I have printed.

Would I buy this again? Yes, definitely. Its good value for money. I would just use another thermistor.

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Whilst I was attending TCT today, E3D made an announcement about their new extruder, the E3D Hermes.

They have taken a dual drive extruder and created their own version. How is it different I hear you say? Well…

  • All of the gears are metal and fully hardened.
  • Each groove in the drive gear is custom milled (they have followed the crowd and announced they were manufactured on a swiss lathe), rather than using a tap.
  • There is no lubrication required due to the type of material chosen for the gears and the use of Igus bearings.
  • The extruder body is made of aluminium with optimised airflow, allowing for the use of lower powered fans. The airflow is directed upwards and away from the print area.
  • A custom nema 17 motor is used. The end caps od a standard nema motor are replaced with custom die cast and machined parts. These allow for the bearing recesses to become part of the motor casing. T-slots have also been machined into the caps to aid in extruder mounting and mounting other objects to the extruder, such as a BLTouch.
  • All items that require user interaction are at the top, such as idler tension and release.
  • It is smaller than their current titan aero extruders.
  • They are following Prusa and will be allowing the QC information of the extruder to be followed all the way through.

The E3D Hermes will be released as a complete package, contain the custom motor, extruder and hot end (including a nozzle, heater cartridge and thermistor).

I know what you’re thinking, this sounds expensive. They have made sure that the extruder can be manufactured using mass manufacturing techniques and have promised a price significantly less than £100.

The most crucial bit of information is when is it available? 4-6 weeks from now. So November.

Pictures of a production prototype and slides from the presentation are below. Ignore the PCB on the extruder, that is a whole other story…

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I know I’ve been fairly quiet on here but I have been working on a few things behind the scenes.

Over the next few days I’m going to write about my super cheap enclosure, printing in ABS, a volcano hot end upgrade kit, how I’m getting on with the wham bam flexible system and SMuFF (I now have all the parts printed).

I also feel I’m almost in a good enough place to do a comparison post of pre mods and post mods (aimed at Ryan).

So watch this space…

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In the post I wrote about the latest changes I had made to my predator, I described how I had mounted the magball arms and which adaptors I had used.

Well a few days ago, Nealz Engeland pointed me in the direction of these adaptors on thingiverse. How are these different I hear you ask? Ignoring the first two files on there, the second two files allow you to use the PCB adaptors supplied with the smart effector! This improves the precision of the carriages, reducing calibration deviation even further.

I printed the version without the hole for flying extruder and designed these adaptors. They attach in front of the PCB carriage adaptors and the rubber tubing used on the flying extruder attaches to them.

I printed them in ABS, but more on that later…

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I received the Wham Bam System the other day. Before it came, I had watch of the youtube video here and a read over the instructions on the website.

One of the recommendations is to remove the glass bed or build surface that is currently installed to the printer. I can understand the logic in this, as surfaces like glass aren’t very good conductors of heat. Therefore, to install another build platform on top would reduce the effectiveness of the heated bed.

After mulling it over, I decided that the heated bed had to come off. To achieve this, you need to heat it up to at least 90 degrees Celsius. The adhesive holding it down is then soft enough for you to be able to use a combination of spatulas and flat bladed screw drivers to gently prize it off.

What remains is a very thin heated bed. During the removal of the ultrabase, it is virtually impossible to not bend or misshape it. You could try and bend it back into shape, but the first knock or fast probe would bend it out of shape all over again.

I took the decision to bond a 4mm aluminium plate to the top of the bed. I got the plate laser cut by a nearby company who have done work for me in the past, but any laser cutting company who deal with aluminium should be able to do it for you. There is a company on ebay in the UK who will laser cut a 380mm piece of 4mm aluminium for £29 (including postage). I used JB Weld to attach the heated bed to the aluminium with great success.

Following the instructions, I then installed the heated bed.

I then installed the bed to my printer.

I’ve done a bit of printing with it so far, but I’m still tweaking my cura profile to match it. One thing to remember when printing PLA is that you need to halve your standard first layer. My first layer is now 0.1mm but I’ve still seen a little bit of lift (I am not using a brim anymore). Another note as well, I was also seeing temperatures on the build plate 5 degrees lower than what was being reported by the printer (maybe due to not soaking the aluminium plate long enough, I don’t know), but I now print with a heat bed temperature of 75 degrees. Wham Bam state you should print with a temperature 10 degrees higher than you did before.

My mesh height map is not fantastic, but I am hoping that the duet will deal with that.

I’ll add another post about using the Wham Bam Flexible System once I’ve done some more printing.

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Just a short post to say that I have now received the Wham Bam System and I am already itching to get it installed.

A couple of things to note. I had to pay import duty of £37.58 (which included £12 processing fee). Bit of a bummer but was expected.

Secondly, I am currently trying to decide how I want to mount this. My options are mount directly on top of the ultrabase glass, mount directly to the heated bed (which is super thin) or remove the glass, mount an aluminium disc to the heated bed and then mount the Wham Bam system to this.

If anyone has any thoughts on this, that would be great!