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Well, it took me a little longer to get around to it, but I finally broke down and rebuilt my machine.

After over 700 print hours, it was much needed... What was done:

1) Completely disassembled top plate, cheapskates, effector plate, and heated bed platform.

2) Took the doors off, cut the tab off the top, and installed the door hinges that my buddy Dave (Sonrisa3D) designed 3) Scrapped the stock EZStruder mount and printed JetPad's mount. Installed it with a 1/16" neoprene gasket between it and the top plate.

4) Installed a new spool mount on the top. 5) Re-Trued and leveled all my towers with the help of a machinist's square and aforementioned buddy Dave.

6) Removed all steppers and checked pulleys and dampers to ensure mounting and grub screws were still tight/loctited. I also drilled out the access holes to the stepper motor mounting screws with a 5/16" bit for easier access down the road.

7) Replaced pan head endstop screws with socket cap, and also printed caps for them to make them hand-adjustable. These are a tight press-fit, and then I hit them with a couple drops of CA just to be sure they stay tight.

8) Cut notches in the top and bottom plates in order to route the wires through some PVC pipe. I slotted it on a table saw and gave it a couple coats of fire-engine red.
9) Used the paracord trick I saw somewhere on here for the wires to the effector. Really happy with it. Looks great and very functional. I did 4 separate wire groups - heater cartridge, LED ring, fan, thermistor - so that if anything goes wrong or needs to be replaced/upgraded, I don't have to take the whole thing apart.

10) Painted effector plate white, reprinted 626Pilots mounts in black, and reprinted the E3D fan shroud in white 11) Installed an On/Off switch for the LED ring on the bottom plate. I also had a bunch of caps lying around and decided to make a bomb, er, a "capacitor box" to get rid of the infernally annoying LED rippling. It's 14, 50v 1000uF caps in parallel. Why 14? Well, I tried 1 with no luck. Then tried 3, no luck. So why not 14, right? Hooked it up, and no more rippling. ...

Here's the capacitor box... 12) Used a torque screwdriver to tighten down the Onyx. Set it to 5lbs, brought it up to temp, then tightened in a star pattern. This definitely took some of the warp out of my surface.


13) And finally, painted the LCD panel the same fire engine red, designed and printed a new knob, and painted most of the trim on the machine ultra white.
Really happy with it. Print quality is back to darn-near-perfect again, it looks great, and will be much easier to work on in the future.

Smoothie board is right around the corner, and I'm really considering the Kraken!

That looks great! I have to look up that paracord thing - I like the way that cleans up all the hot end wiring. That's the worst part of mine right now.

Thanks for the cap.stl - perfect for the intended use.
That white effector helps to set the whole thing off, cool idea.
Your capacitor bomb made me laugh, it's amazing sometimes what you have
to do to get rid of a some ripple in the voltage.

Can you say more about the spool mount? What issues were you having, etc...

I suspect I've been having some retraction and feed issues that are related to the stock design, and I'm starting to poke around at alternative designs.

The main "issue" is that I've been printing with less-than-spool amounts of nylon. I made an adjustable spool, and it didn't fit on the stock mount.

The new mount is very straightforward, and I do think that it feeds much easier into the EZstruder.

Also, it will handle any spool size, so no need to print different arms for wider spools.

Thanks!

I've been thinking about a design with a section of tubing between the EZstruder and the spool thinking it might control the filament when the spool is full and it wants to unwind itself and tangle.

I do like how you have oriented the spool flat.

cope413 wrote:12) Used a torque screwdriver to tighten down the Onyx. Set it to 5lbs, brought it up to temp, then tightened in a star pattern. This definitely took some of the warp out of my surface.

5 in-lbs or ft-lbs?

sorry about that, in-lbs.