Upgrading an Orion

[XpresoAdct]

Hi awesome people.
I have a quandary. My first printer was an Orion. I have upgraded it to an E3d, added an enclosure, and added LEDs. It was a early 2014 model so I also added a fan. I have the new cheapsakes and ball arms.
I am feeling limited by the six inch cylinder print area. I am considering 1) Sell it and buy a Rostock 2) buy another frame it and build it into something larger with Orion internals or 3) leave it alone already and print things that fit in a six inch cylinder.
What are your thoughts?

[ccavanaugh]

Keep your Orion and build a larger printer.

Having a spare printer on hand to print repairs for the "other" printer is always a bonus. It can also serve as a platform for experimentation and not put a stable configuration as risk should you want to.

[teoman]

It depends on your financial and space situation.

[Holy1]

I built my Orion into a larger machine. You can click on my signature to check it out.

[Windshadow]

I built my Orion into a larger machine. You can click on my signature to check it out.

Holy1, That is a most impressive design.

the professional cable management makes it a very clean looking printer

if I ever feel the need to have a cartesian printer i very much doubt i could do anywhere near as good a job and the fact that you repurposed all but the frame of your orion makes it even more impressive.

[XpresoAdct]

Thanks for your thoughts so far!
I should have mentioned I do have a cartesian printer as a back up already, a FlashForge Creator Pro. I bought one of their customer returns off ebay which was a fun project itself. Instead of diagnosing and fixing returns, they keep them in the customer's shipping box and put it directly on ebay.
Reason I mention the FlashForge, is I do have one back up printer already.

@Holy1: That is one amazing conversion! I know you mentioned you would not do a kit and that makes me cry.

I feel that besides the limited build volume, I cannot recall a time when I had reliable printing throughout the entire print area. Perhaps I have not calibrated it well, but I have taken a dial gauge and spent entire weekends tweaking the endstop screws until they were completely zeroed out.
Prints in the center of the bed were beautiful, however prints near the edge of the build volume cylinder about 30 degrees offset from a tower would either be too low or too high. This resulting no layer as the head was lightly dragging on the bed or no bed adhesion as the head was a bit too high and follow on layers would knock or pick up the raised unsecured layer.

I am going to finish with the new skates, arms, and ball platform, along with dampers and see what difference if any that makes. I am just torn how much more to try and work on the Orion or bail and move onto a Rostock or something else.
Decisions, decisions.

[Xenocrates]

That sounds like your horizontal radius is off, which is a fixable configuration issue. ArtexMG has a nice spreadsheet and so on to help with that here: http://forum.seemecnc.c ... urn false; That should get you more build area. As far as conversion versus acquisition, I would recommend buying an additional Rostock, rather than tearing apart a working Orion, as the cost differential wouldn't be very large (you'd save ~200$) and lose a working printer as well as having the hassle of taking it apart and putting it together again. But get your Orion working well first. It shouldn't be too hard to tweak the horizontal radius (I took about 45 minutes to do it starting from a very wrong value). About 6 iterations of manual calibration should get you a pretty good level.

[Eaglezsoar]

If funds allow I would keep the Orion and purchase the Rostock V2.
If funds do not allow you could consider selling the Orion via our forum or Ebay.
If seems to me that taking parts from such a fine printer as the Orion would not be the way I would do it.
In the end it is up to you and I wish you well.