Sunday.. Design small enclosure for a project in Tinkercad.
Monday.. Try printing it, but if fails after coming unstuck from the bed
Tuesday.. Try again, but this time you didn't notice the slicer failed and you end up with some bizarre extra layer that ruins it half way through
Wednesday.. Try again, but you have a power cut and it stops the print at 50%
Thursday... Try again but it curls so badly you have to bin it
Friday.. The print head jams and you spend 2 hours cleaning the nozzle, heater block and recalibrating it all
Saturday.. You go to Maplins and buy the same enclosure for £2.29 and decide that 3d printing is the most unrewarding hobby ever
Sunday (tomorrow)... Pack printer away
And in three months' time, need a part that you can't get around the corner (or at all), drag the printer out and wish you'd spent the time this week getting it dialed in so it behaves.
These things can take a lot of dicking around to get right but, once you're there, they behave pretty well.
Spent the time this week? Spent the time this past 3 months.
There's dicking around, and there's coming to the conclusion that this thing swallows up far too much time for so little reward.
I always knew these things needed a lot of attention, but not this much.
Anyway... it looks pretty
There's variability in everything, but the better you get your basic setup the more quirks you can handle without causing an issue. I just tried for several weekends to re-print a similar design to one I've already made successfully on the Rostock, with no enclosure at all, using the same color ABS from the same supplier. Even with the enclosure, I binned at least two of them that completed (to the tune of 8 hours each) and more that failed before completion. To quell the cracking on this roll of filament to the point that I think I can acetone-weld the cracks shut and stabilize the structure took an enclosure actively heated to 35-40C.
I'm making handy stuff that's not available for any price on the open market, but I understand the frustrations with the quirks, especially for someone who, as I recall, also has a machine shop at his disposal.
I am not that fussed, just disappointed with its ability. I know there are people who are having great success with it, and won't hear a word against it.
But, for my uses, it just takes far too much time. No amount of setting up, calibrating, fine adjustment etc, seems to make this thing work reliably (for me anyway).
I design custom electronic and project parts and that in itself take up a lot of time. I was purchasing (and still am) a lot of expensive ABS enclosures for these projects.
I hoped to be able to produce my own, with the required cutouts etc.
But, it has not worked that way. Its still far far quicker to purchase the required ABS enclosure (I usually buy bulk amounts from China) and simply adapt them. You can do that within an hour.
If I need a mechanical part, then I usually fall back on aluminium. I needed a servo operated clamp a few weeks ago. I designed it, but just could not get a successful/acceptable print.
An hour in the workshop and I had made it out of aluminium angle and sheet.
Can you post your STL file for what your trying to print?
Large rectangles with 90 degree corners are prone to lifting right at the corner due to shrinkage so a very warm room or enclosure is needed to minimise it.
Breezes from open windows also really don't help along with if you accidentally run your layer cooling fan with ABS (normally you don't run your cooling fan with ABS but it does have advanced uses in specific scenarios).
Adding a brim can help or modifying your model with essentially thin discs 1mm thick or so intersecting each corner in your modelling software, this gives you a large contact patch at each corner.. you then snap off the excess of these temporary discs and smooth off with Acetone (Propanone) for ABS.
I've used this technique for many prints when I need a high contact patch area the model doesn't possess but needs to print well (essentially a hand made bespoke brim for specific areas). You could also make sure your model doesn't have sharp corners if that's possible.. looks better imo also.
How you slice, fill density and type obviously also influences the shrink percentage in any direction.... hexagonal is quite good in my experience.
PLA is much easier as it doesn't shrink as much so rectangular boxes are much easier in PLA.. but with experience and a calm logical approach ABS is doable for this type of object, it's not rocket science but there are numerous variables to account for so unfortunately there is a bit of a learning curve.
Myself personally at first with ABS I wasn't using enough glue as my experience with PLA was I couldn't get the prints off with large contact patches.. so this carried over into initial ABS failures.
I personally use repetier with Slicer or Cura and inspect every prospective print after slicing before I commit to actually printing it. 2 minutes doing this on a multi hour print is worth doing. Not sure about Matter Control as I gave up with it and moved back to Repetier as the latter is more reliable with some functionality I need that MC doesn't have...
Mine's settled down now for most of the printing I do. Small parts generally, centred on the bed, which are much easier to get to not lift at the corners etc. But it's far from perfect. Even if it was, the very nature of these machines and what they create leaves layer artefacts and a general level of finish that I simply wouldn't put in front of a customer as anything but a prototype - especially for an enclosure. I know a fair few folk do, some (looking at you, MHackney) even make a sales point of the 3d printing side of it and that works well for them.
My customers don't give two hoots for the tech used to create their gear, they care about what it looks like sitting on their bench/in their rack etc far more and 3D printing just doesn't cut it for finish. I would generally use off-the-shelf enclosures as a preference for that reason. Maybe using the printer to create an internal subframe to hold things in place. If I simply couldn't find what I was after I might print an oversize blank and finish it with a CNC router but I haven't had to do that yet.
I also find that, even when it's working, by the time I factor my time into the equation (design, print once, fix, print again) any off-the-shelf enclosure or part is usually going to be cheaper unless it's something particularly exotic.
Still. It's a shame to hear you've had such a rough run getting it going.
Might I suggest looking at other filament options? ABS absolutely sucks to print with and there are lots of options that provide equal or better mechanical strength without any of the warping, curling, or bed adhesion issues - namely the PET/PETG filaments (PET+, nGen, Colorfabb XT, nVent, PETG, etc)
Fellow Philosophy majors unite!
"The proverbial achilles heel of property monistic epiphenomenalism is the apparent impossibility of ex-nihilo materialization of non-structural and qualitatively new causal powers."
There are several reasons your print might not be coming out as yo wish. i have made a list of all my print failures and what might have been the reason. Most things are really simple. I put the Rostock max V2 together from the kit and I couldn't be happier with it. I am no electrical engineer or any thing close to it. I am mechanically pretty good and took my time with the construction.
After using ABS and PLA filament i pretty much use PLA exclusively now.
Printing a small item can be challenging. A small base does not give much surface area to stick to. Are the layer fans all turned off or at reduced fan speed (PLA)? Are the X,Y.Z arms and bed adjustment pretty good. paper drag test. Consider printing a raft around around the base to give more stability. Are the skates snug against the rails. Are the motor belts snug and not slipping? Readjusting the top motor pulley is needed at times. Decrease the speed of the axis movement, 300 mm/sec may be too fast and knock it off, try 100mm/sec. If a print is going to take several hours,make sure your computer never goes to sleep.
I print something almost daily and have wonderful results. it shouldn't be frustrating to get a decent print.
Of course sometimes Matter Control quits unexpectedly and the print stops. Then you must "home" the axis arms back to the top and begin again.
If all this doesn't work then the problem becomes trickier. Are all the wires on the Rambo board attached properly? Any rogue strand of wire touching another one? Are the soldering points all good on the Onyx board? Hot end connections all good?
Check and recheck connections.
I think most of the Rostock Max owners are happy with the machines they built. For the money it is a very capable 3D Printer.
Hope your machine gets you results you are looking to achieve.
The general wisdom I've seen here is that with PLA it's harder to get a good first layer, but all the layers after that come out easy; whereas with ABS, it's easier to get a good first layer, but the ones after that are more problematic unless you have a heated build chamber. (Delamination, etc.) If you want to get some more return on your investment, you might think about switching to PLA for awhile, and then go back to ABS when you have some things nailed down better. After you get your settings (particularly Z height) nailed, 1st-layer adhesion is less of a problem. I printed out a planetary gear transmission last year in PLA, and due to the nature of the parts, it required placing all kinds of tiny dots of PLA on the first layer and then drawing lines around them. If you ca do that, you can get a perfect first layer for just about any part I could imagine.
The best way I've found to get a good 1st layer with PLA: Elmer's school glue sticks ($12 for a year supply) and the bed at 50-60C. There is no need to fool around with ABS juice. Blue painter's tape also works, but is easily gouged, and in my experience less reliable than Elmer's glue. Ditto Kapton tape.
With PLA, you should never need to put "mouse ears" on your parts as suggested above, or use a brim to keep it from curling up off the glass. (However, it does like to curl on the upper edges, especially if they're sharp, so you'd want to have a good part cooling fan solution for any sharp edges/overhangs. Doubly so if you ever want to print single-walled vases.) It won't stand up to a lot of heat, so if your circuits have a lot of heat sinks and no cooling fans, then maybe not so much - but for something that will run with an internal temperature under ~110F, you should be fine. Nylon would also be a good choice, although it has to be printed very slowly - something like 10-15mm/sec. Nylon and ABS are both far superior to PLA if your enclosures will be used outside or left in cars for long periods. PLA is no good at all in direct sunlight, and will soften somewhere not much above 110F. I put some PLA parts in my dish washer a couple years ago, and they came out comically deformed.
PETG is also nice. I've noticed it's not quite as stiff as PLA, but it might be okay for your application.
Another material you might want to consider, since you're doing enclosures, is Taulman T-Glase. It's made out of light pipe material, and with a coating of XTC-3D, can be made very nearly transparent. If you have LEDs on your circuit boards that you'd like to be able to see on the surface of the enclosure, you could use T-Glase to print a serviceable window, or an internal light pipe that would bring the photons to the surface of the enclosure. There are quite a few possibilities.
There are also some more exotic filaments that are useful for enclosures. I saw some hybrid cobalt/PLA stuff a few months ago that's intended for use with medical devices. The cobalt helps to shield the internal circuitry from EM noise.
The machine is dialed in pretty well I think. Paper test under the nozzle is perfect centre and each tower.
Belts etc are all fine.
I don't like PLA. Its brittle and not much use for my projects. Plus, I did have nozzle blocking issues when I used it.
I have ordered a different roll of filament and I will try that. I certainly cannot use the printer for its intended task - custom enclosures... I just don't have the time available to faff around with it anymore.
I will stick with using pre-made enclosures, and this will just be a large monument in the corner of the dining room for now.
I hear your pain, but there is so much more to the calibration and "dialing in" than the paper test and the perfect center. I would hate PLA too, if it was getting stuck in the nozzle, but luckily it does not happen for me. If I had to guess, this is another calibration issue; things to look at: PEEK cooling, and retraction settings. Bottom line is that printing requires a lot of time, and most of it is spent figuring out what needs to be dialed in. This is especially true with Rostock, but that is also the reason a lot of us are here. I have another type of printer, which barely needs any calibration beyond bed leveling, but I've got Rostock to learn, then upgrade, and build a better printer. That said, I am able to produce parts that look good and are fun and functional, a clock, a phone case, a statue (just some of the recent).
Finishing may or may not be an issue, if your customers expect factory flat look, this may not be the best way to achieve it, but the texture may be a part of the design, or you can sand it and paint it. Rostock is also capable of laser cutting, which could be used for flat panels of your enclosures, while printed parts used as structural/support. Again, you would have to spend more time figuring this out. My conclusion is that if you need the printer for production of enclosures it really has to be dialed in, which includes geometry, bed, print settings, and the filament. This requires a lot of time to figure out, days, month, or even years. It is not that simple. and if it were, manufacturers would sell you the perfect machine and all you would have to do is load the design and print it.
Good luck!
Stevolution wrote:I don't like PLA. Its brittle and not much use for my projects. Plus, I did have nozzle blocking issues when I used it.
If you're using the stock SeeMe hot end, that's probably why. The E3D v6 is a far better hot end. It's all metal, and will print any material you like. With their hardened steel nozzles, you can do carbon fiber- and metal powder-filled filaments. There's no PTFE liner inside, either. That was most of what gave me trouble. I'm told that the Prometheus is also really good. It allows much longer retracts. I haven't used it myself, but longer retracts can be useful when you're using PLA.
Since you're abandoning the printer, that doesn't do you much good, but someone else reading this who has the same problem might do well with an E3D or Prometheus.
626Pilot wrote:If you're using the stock SeeMe hot end, that's probably why. The E3D v6 is a far better hot end.
I think he is using E3D, but I had good results with PLA on stock hot end too. I agree on all accounts about E3D, higher temps was a good enough reason for me to upgrade. As far as retraction goes, if I remember correctly matterhackers recommend very short retractions ~2mm for E3D, if Prometheus allows for longer retracts it could make a big difference.
2mm is about as far as you can reliably go on an E3D with PLA. The plastic likes to swell, and the interface between the heat break and the heat sink gives it a tiny crevice to expand into, encouraging jamming. The Prometheus is designed with a really long threaded section on the nozzle, so there's nowhere for the plastic to expand into, even if you retract 10mm. I don't think I was ever able to print on an E3D v6 with more than ~2.5mm of retraction. After awhile - maybe 20 minutes or so - it would heat-soak the upper reaches of the hot end, and the filament would jam.
626Pilot wrote:I don't think I was ever able to print on an E3D v6 with more than ~2.5mm of retraction. After awhile - maybe 20 minutes or so - it would heat-soak the upper reaches of the hot end, and the filament would jam.
If I had to guess this is the problem that OP has experienced with the jamming-the retraction is not dialed in. My retraction is also short with E3D v6. However, I have not experienced "heat-soak" issue even on longer prints. i am not sure why exactly, but I am sure it has something to do with cooling. The bottom fin on the heat sink on my E3D stays cold to the touch, and I have used heat sink compound on the threads.
Well I have tried over and over again. Altered retraction, speed, extrusion speed etc. Just cannot get a decent repeatable outcome.
I need 12x brackets for a project and I can't waste any more time trying to print them. The Petg seemed a bit easier to work with at first, but its stringy and oozy... goes all over the place. That leads to lumps which the head then crashes into.
First decent offer for the printer and its gone. Patience expired.
626Pilot wrote:I don't think I was ever able to print on an E3D v6 with more than ~2.5mm of retraction. After awhile - maybe 20 minutes or so - it would heat-soak the upper reaches of the hot end, and the filament would jam.
If I had to guess this is the problem that OP has experienced with the jamming-the retraction is not dialed in. My retraction is also short with E3D v6. However, I have not experienced "heat-soak" issue even on longer prints. i am not sure why exactly, but I am sure it has something to do with cooling. The bottom fin on the heat sink on my E3D stays cold to the touch, and I have used heat sink compound on the threads.
I was wrong about the length. It's more like 3.5-4mm on the E3D v6. I may have had "heat soak" issues with some stuff that was advertised as PLA, but was really "PLAdium," a mixture of PLA and T-Glase. I don't know if it's even made anymore.
Stevolution wrote:Well I have tried over and over again. Altered retraction, speed, extrusion speed etc. Just cannot get a decent repeatable outcome.
I need 12x brackets for a project and I can't waste any more time trying to print them. The Petg seemed a bit easier to work with at first, but its stringy and oozy... goes all over the place. That leads to lumps which the head then crashes into.
First decent offer for the printer and its gone. Patience expired.
Sorry to hear it. Whenever people offer their printers for sale here, they usually seem to go within a few weeks. If you still need the brackets printed, you can probably find someone to do it on MakeXYZ or 3DHubs.
I keep trying and trying.... I do have patience... honest!
Finally, after failure after failure, I give up and pack it away.
But... I don't like to admit defeat... so out it comes again 2 weeks later
But, its pretty useless to me. The time spent WAY outweighs its benefits.
As for the brackets, I simply ordered some solid aluminum bar and a few other bits on Ebay for £20. One evening in the workshop and I have 12 very nice anodised mounting brackets.
If I get a decent offer, then I will probably simply let it go and mark it down as an experience
None commercial FDM 3D printers, are really not great tools for people who are going to depend on them for production, who don't have the time to mess around with them.
They can certainly work in environments like that, but there is a steep learning curve and a lot of attention to detail required to getting good consistent prints, they can be extremely frustrating for a lot of people and delta style printers without auto calibration are worse than most modern cartesian printers in this regard, because they are far more susceptible to bad configuration or misalignment during the build.
I've been using 3D printers for years and on my V1 Max I usually load up a model in kisslicer, tweak a few settings depending on the model or material being used, slice, load the result into Repetier and print it, I rarely get failures and when I do, I have enough experience to know what I'm looking at and understand what I need to change to get it printed, in a production environment getting that experience is going to be very frustrating.
