Support quickly got back to my email and confirmed that they will be sending me the replacement pulley. The guy I spoke to was nice and understanding. At least now I can confirm they have good support too. He encouraged me to continue the build while I wait for the part since the stepper motor will still be accessible. I didn't think it would be too easy to get to it with the top of the base on, but I took his word and continued on. As it turns out, hes right, it is pretty accessible still.
So I don't bore you all with a ton of pictures, lets skip to the tower supports all assembled and installed on the base:
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The tower supports were fairly easy to assemble once I figured out what all the screws were supposed to be. At least with this kit most of the screw sizes are different enough that you'd know right away whether or not you have the right ones. I do wish the manual better described them and showed closeups. Either that or they could have actually labeled each bag with the part numbers. In some instances the part name mentioned in the manual was completely different from the names of the parts listed on the inventory checklists.
Next came the top plate, which was much easier for me to get on than the manual suggested:
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I decided not to take any pictures of the washers installed on the bottom side of the top plate since that's pretty boring, but I do want to mention a couple things about that step of the build. The instructions do say that the holes were moved with the release of rev 6, however it does not say this until the end of that page of instructions. I sat there looking at mine for about 5 minutes panicking that they forgot to cut some holes..... until I read further where it says they moved them. This should really be mentioned earlier (or perhaps the old revisions should be taken out if theres no chance of those parts shipping, which is the reason I have to assume they are still in there.) The second thing I want to mention is that there are a few other similar sized holes near the ones used for the onyx mount and just telling us to "rotate" it some number of degrees to find the right holes may find you wondering which of these holes are actually for the mount. I was briefly confused about which one was the right hole in a couple spots, but I figured it out. Maybe that's just me though... My brain does silly things sometimes
Aside from that, the washers were pretty easy to get in. I used the "drawing in" with a screw technique and it work beautifully. I recommend that method over hitting it with a screwdriver as the manual also suggested. If you do decide to draw them in you absolutely must make sure you use a washer. At this point you should still have a few of the washers that came with the kit left; I used one of those.
Next came tightening up all the things I left loose. I didn't want to over-tighten anything so I used the nuts as a reference. I have carpel tunnel so I tend to do as much as I can with the electric driver, but if you can you should probably avoid that for this part unless you're extremely confident and know how much torque your driver puts out. I definitely recommend hand tightening these.
If you do use an electric driver for this part, make sure you pay close attention to the nuts.
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As you can see above, the first picture is a loose nut and the second picture is a tightened one. As you screw it down watch the nut. You want to stop it as it touches the lip below the channel that the screw goes through. This is why it's important to use something with low torque and be aware of how long your driver takes to stop when you let go of the trigger. Since you can't feel how tight it is with the electric driver you need to be careful.
Yet another issue I found with the manual (again in reference to the onyx bed) is that at the beginning of the thermistor prep it tells you how much plastic tubing to cut. If you have a Rev7 bed this instruction will be very wrong. You need more like a quarter of an inch than 1.25 inches. As you can see in the following picture, I had prepped the thermistor before I even looked at the bed and once I taped it down I realized what I did wrong. This image is what it looks like if you blindly follow directions like I did:
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All fixed here:
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And here's the LED soldered on (I love showing off my soldering... you're going to see a lot of pictures of my soldering lol)
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And all the components mounted to the bed:
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Next came the tricky part of mounting the bed. I had a bit of difficulty lining up the first couple holes, but after you get 2 or 3 in it becomes much easier. Here's one last shot of the finished base:
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I'm glad that besides the one pulley, everything else has been going well. Yesterday I spent about 4 hours on the build. Today was 3 hours. I think I'm making decent time. I may go back and run the wires through the aluminum supports tonight, but probably not.
Also, I know the wiring looks like a rats nest right now... but don't worry I will be cleaning it up once I get a better idea of where everything is going down there. I'm more focused on getting it together first.
