3 Day Tuneup - Your Mileage May Vary

[Jimustanguitar]

My printer says that it's printed for 2 days 18 hours and 57 minutes... I haven't touched it in the last couple weeks because of work and a Florida trip, but I noticed before I left that one of the carrier bearings had loosened a little bit. (I could spin one of the outside bearings with my fingers)

Anyway, I thought about this all week and decided to snug everything up when I got back to it. I did most of that this evening, and I found several screws that weren't at the same torque as they were after assembly. I *think* that the melamine is either drying just a tad or compressing ever so slightly under pressure. Either way, I got about a quarter turn on most of my screws in wood and a 'click' or two on a few of the t-slot bolts.

I don't know what everyone else's experience has been, and I'll admit that I've been rougher to my machine than most (putting it on its side in my car every week for makerspace), but I would highly recommend doing a nut and bolt check on your printer in the 50-75 hour range. Is this what other have found as well?

I'll let you know if I think it improved my prints or not tomorrow when I finish up. It definitely upped the placebo effect a few points though

[Broose]

I notice with mine that every time I move it, I need to check the squareness of the towers to the bed with a steel carpenter's square. When its off, I can usually make it square again by pushing or pulling on the top of the tower a little while holding the base fixed. This affects the squareness of the other towers, but I can usually get them all squared up in about 5 minutes without taking anything apart. Does anybody else notice that this needs to be done periodically or do you find that your machine stays square after moving it or carrying it in a car? Its possible I am not keeping the tower bolts tight enough.

[lordbinky]

How you're supposed to align the towers has always troubled me. Yeah I can get them aligned by trying to brute force shifting them around or loosen some screws and try the exact same thing and retighten them (I've just moved my rostock around a couple times... I've yet to print....so close yet so far....). What I'm curious about is that there has to be some lateral force even if it's very small, could that make enough shift in the towers to affect a print? Or is it so small and slow that the wood relaxing or flexing with temperature overshadows that?

[Jimustanguitar]

How you're supposed to align the towers has always troubled me.

To be honest, I've never checked my towers with a square. I made sure that all of the t-slots were precisely the same length, and I used a clamp to pull all of the extrusions tight against the melamine when I bolted them in, but that's about it. I'm not making parts with critical dimensions or pieces that are large enough for this to make a difference anyway. Someday I will, but for right now I haven't been worried about it.

[kbob]

How you're supposed to align the towers has always troubled me. Yeah I can get them aligned by trying to brute force shifting them around or loosen some screws and try the exact same thing and retighten them (I've just moved my rostock around a couple times... I've yet to print....so close yet so far....). What I'm curious about is that there has to be some lateral force even if it's very small, could that make enough shift in the towers to affect a print? Or is it so small and slow that the wood relaxing or flexing with temperature overshadows that?

I worked out an easy, repeatable way to align the towers. I wrote it up in my build log here. I think you'd have to loosen the top bolts to square the towers to the bottom -- I did it when I first built my printer.

[lordbinky]

Yeah, but even loosening the bolts I don't get anything I'd call controllable movement, the T-nuts keep it in where they want it pretty well. So it just bothered me how much force I have to put shifting the towers to get any displacement even with all the t-nuts loose on a tower.

[kbob]

Yeah, but even loosening the bolts I don't get anything I'd call controllable movement, the T-nuts keep it in where they want it pretty well. So it just bothered me how much force I have to put shifting the towers to get any displacement even with all the t-nuts loose on a tower.

I aligned my towers before I put the top on. You might have to remove your top to align your towers. If you loosen all the T-nuts at the top, you have to realign the top anyway, so it's already a bother.