Welcome to the SeeMeCNC Community

I'll make this short and sweet for now, but please feel free to respond with questions if you have them and hopefully I'll remember to check back here soon.

In short, I build RoMaxes semi-professionally, and my most recent client wanted the freedom to print objects up to 24" tall. I said, sure, no problem. For around 100 dollars you can make the mods yourself, or build a new one (much easier) with my specs.

FINAL assembled height: well over five feet.
FINAL assembled build height: 32" OR 804.145mm

So what does one need to make this happen?

1. Longer extrusions.
2. Longer belts.
3. 18AWG, (you DO NOT need 22AWG) and 26AWG wire extensions
4. Longer PTFE bowden tube

And that's literally it!

1. Extrusions: McMaster Part# 47065T101 ($14.20 each - so 42.60 total)

2. Belts: Grab these from Ebay, just search GT2 timing belt 6mm width. There are lots of vendors selling by the foot or meter. You will need almost EXACTLY 27 feet of it. 9 feet for each tower. This gives you about 4-5 inches of extra play to help tighten them on the carriages. I bought 30 feet because it was so cheap. It cost about 30 dollars.

3. McMaster has LOADS of wire, and you'll want MM Part # 8054T11 (about 1 dollar per foot, get some black and red and maybe white if you want to match the endstop wiring) (or similar, but keep them thin, if ordering from anywhere else) for your 26AWG wire extensions. These are the most crucial, but you only need about 12-18 inches of extension! Solder well, friends! Then add heat-shrink. Believe it or not, I didn't need to extend the 18AWG wires. They came quite long by default and just barely made it to the RAMBo AND all the way up and down the massive extrusions. To make it easier, you can extend them by about 12-18 inches as well. Since the 22AWG wires only need to reach the top of the tower anyways, there is MORE than enough already included in the kit, even though you will cut off more than a foot to wire up the heated bed.

4. Tubing: McMaster Part # 52335K32 ($12.70) I bought 5 feet of tubing and cut it down by a little over a foot and a half. You can measure this more precisely on your own. I have 22 inches of the tubing left after the build, so that means I used 38 inches of tubing. Results may vary depending on the extruder and hotend you use so measure twice and cut once!

So that's a little less than 100 dollars? Or a little more if you buy extra 18AWG wire.


(I also ALWAYS replace the cheap power supplies shipped by default with high quality modular (saves on wire clutter) PSUs from EVGA. 500-600W is more than enough!) You can find them on Amazon or your favorite computer PSU vendor's shop. Corsair's offering in the lower-end aren't as nice as their higher-ups.

That's all there is to it, solder on your wire extensions as needed, which will leave the solder connections JUST below the X tower, giving you JUST enough room for the endstop connectors to reach their endstops. NEVER thread an extended wire through an extrusion. You can do all the extrusion-threading with the supplied wire. It's all long enough. Just add extensions where needed.

Thanks for reading!

[img]http://i.imgur.com/jx4H7UA.jpg[/img]

[img]http://i.imgur.com/nVAWU1d.jpg[/img]

[img]http://i.imgur.com/itSlaOb.jpg[/img]

How long does calibration take for that? The constant homing and traveling down, and how well does it stay in calibration with the towers flexing?

you should look into some sort of flying-extruder

nice wright up, but 2 things.

are you talking about using 48" (4 ft) t-rails?
if so IDK how your getting 32" build height.

14.5" + 16" = 30.5"

the second thing... if your buying a new kit, save money and contact SeemeCNC first. I just ordered an R Max v2 kit from them and it only cost about $50 extra for the 30.5" build height. They were helpful and more then willing to accommodate me.

Interesting for sure. Extending the bowden tube even longer could cause more friction and possibly more issues. The Fly-N-Strude (mentioned above) might be your best out of box experience for such long travel.

http://www.tricklaser.com/Fly-N-Strude- ... YNSTRD.htm

Great job in building this printer. That printer is TALL!

To answer the questions:

@Nylocke, calibration was actually shorter than ever for this machine. Sure it takes another 2-3 seconds for the carriages to travel down the towers, but overall I got the whole thing up and running perfectly in about 2-3 hours. The other Romaxes have taken a lot longer than that, at times. Finessing the horizontal radius and perfect tower positions isn't easy but I'm learning the tricks to it and going slowly enough to make it work. All that was done using F3500 commands. It could easily home at F4000 or 5000 I imagine, if you really wanted to save those few seconds. The only MAJOR issue, and one that I might solve with some clever elastic lines, is that the huge bowden tube and cables can sometimes get caught under the endstop switch of the axis that the tube is leaning toward. It's not a major problem to just flip the tube out of the way, but I would like to address it at some point by perhaps tethering the mid-point of the tube to the extruder mount in some way, just to keep things nice and centered.

[During this whole process I was teaching myself MatterControl... but I ended up hating it and went right back to RepHost. There is no high-level control of models and it's very difficult to view exactly what you want to print. I could see it being useful for people who only print stock models from Thingiverse, but I really couldn't see it being use for someone who needs to tweak almost every model a bit.]

@Bubbasnow, I had no idea that existed but honestly (at least for PLA) it doesn't look necessary. I printed using mostly default settings (including 5.4mm retracts just like on a normal Rostock), and it printed pretty much perfectly. In fact it might have been under-retracting at times. The whole mechanism of a flying extruder looks absurd and seems to pin a ton of extra weight on the carriages. I DO NOT want that. They're already doing plenty of work by traveling up and down the super long towers.

I may however look into this for printing NinjaFlex on my 3mm modded Rostock at home.

@FrznTek, Yes I used 48" rails. The build height is 804.145mm, or 31.6535 inches. I'm sorry if rounding that up to 32" offended you, but it seemed pretty fair. You can't just add the inches to the original extrusion length. Remember that some of that length is hidden inside the top and bottom platform plates and mounting brackets.

I actually wanted to use their 32" extrusions for a side project and had to build THIS particular printer IMMEDIATELY. There was no time to go back and forth. The client basically gave me a hard deadline of one week and I rush-ordered the stock kit to make sure I got everything in time.

The SeeMeCNC folks can be busy sometimes, I get that, and I already bug them enough. Obviously in the future I would like to not waste time/money by including extra stuff I'll be upgrading or replacing anyways... so I will talk to them about it in the future. My workshop is already overflowing with extra stuff from the... 8(?) printers I have built and maintained in the past few years.


@KAS, that looks AWESOME... but doesn't that put a lot of additional strain on the carriages? Like I said above, I used default settings for PLA and the 5.4mm retracts that work in the regular old Rostock worked perfectly well in the GIANT Rostock. Even on a massive print test.

@Eaglezsoar, thanks much

Bringing the extruder down a little closer would allow the use of different hotends that tend to be finicky with longer retracts. But if you're using it without issue with PLA right now, then I say press on. I don't have the specifics with the weight distribution and long term effects but I know a few people use it here without any issues.

That thing looks awesome!

Artesian wrote: @FrznTek, Yes I used 48" rails. The build height is 804.145mm, or 31.6535 inches. I'm sorry if rounding that up to 32" offended you, but it seemed pretty fair. You can't just add the inches to the original extrusion length. Remember that some of that length is hidden inside the top and bottom platform plates and mounting brackets.

No offence meant or taken, was more along the lines of confusion.

here is what was said to me in my e-mails with SeeMeCNC's support..

... It is pretty simple on a delta machine to extend the Z height. Extrusions, Belts, Wiring.

The current build height is 14.5" with 32" extrusions, and 76" belts. If you want a 24" build height you will need 42" extrusions(x3) and 96" belts(x3)

You can purchase the kit, and then the additional components. With the purchase of the additional components I will have packing get the items cut to the correct length.

For the 24" build height you would need to order:
Rostock kit
30" of Extrusion
60" of Belt

For the 30" build height you would need to order:
Rostock kit
48" of extrusion
120" of belt


If you email me when you place the order I can make sure that things go smoothly with packing and shipping. This part is very important so that I can ensure that the order does not get messed up.

JJ

Artesian wrote: I actually wanted to use their 32" extrusions for a side project and had to build THIS particular printer IMMEDIATELY. There was no time to go back and forth. The client basically gave me a hard deadline of one week and I rush-ordered the stock kit to make sure I got everything in time.

then in that case it made since to do it that way.

Artesian wrote: The SeeMeCNC folks can be busy sometimes, I get that, and I already bug them enough. Obviously in the future I would like to not waste time/money by including extra stuff I'll be upgrading or replacing anyways... so I will talk to them about it in the future. My workshop is already overflowing with extra stuff from the... 8(?) printers I have built and maintained in the past few years.

I just wanted to point that out so if someone cruising the forums that are interested in getting a kit would know they can order it that way and save a little on the upgrade.

@KAS, it really would make things easier and I'll definitely tell my client about it - but doing something novel when I know the stock kits work well was a last resort of sorts. I love the idea of the flying extruder honestly. I wish I had thought to engineer it myself. I suppose I probably could.

@FrznTek, I believe SeeMeCNC is low-balling the estimate because they don't want to oversell the measurements to anyone who uses a non-stock hotend... maybe? 15 going to 30 sounds a lot cleaner than 15 going to 31.65, just for advertising purposes - although I'm honestly shocked they wouldn't also offer wire extensions for the 18 and 26 AWG wiring.

And... I just figured it out! I don't know when you got your kit, but my extrusions are all 32" by default, not 30". There are those missing two inches! Definitely makes more sense now I think.

Stock RMV2 (32" rails) has a Z max of about 394mm (15.5") but nozzle can only reach that height at center. SeeMe is likely stating 14.5" as a realistic Z height above the entire usable bed.

Perhaps this is a better solution to the fly'n'strude (you were concerned about carriage mass?) http://forum.seemecnc.com/viewtopic.php ... 0&start=25

It effectively makes the extruder weightless from what the OP has stated.