About this 3D model

This is a linear delta 3D printer based on Johann's Rostock which has been enlarged to acomodate roughly double the print volume. All of the 3D printed & laser cut parts have been made thanks to the Artilect Fablab Toulouse. This is still work in progress so below you will find a blog like story of the build & set-up: - 30/08/2013 Discovered that one of the Idler_end started to develop cracks, therefore the design of the idler_end was updated to be stronger and as well for a better installation of the end stops. Updated Idler End design (V1.2) is there: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:143186 - 27/08/2013 Found an interesting improvement by Antonio Bencini which adapted magnetic bearings to the enlarged Rostock, this is really cool! - Platform: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:139730 - Carriage: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:139264 - 23/08/2013 Back from holidays... - Following Zoltan's comment I realized that I had forgotten to put the platform STL, this is corrected now. Anyway it is unchanged from the Original Rostock one. - 09/07/2013 Presentation of the Enlarged rostock development (in French, sorry for the English speakers) http://prezi.com/slg0ddtggc2_/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy - 15/06/2013 Refined calibration - Refined the calibration of the extruder folowing the process proposed by: - Triffid Hunter: http://reprap.org/wiki/Triffid_Hunter%27s_Calibration_Guide - Tantillus: http://www.tantillus.org/Tutorials.html - Performed retraction calibratio, After fiddeling with various retraction values & extra lengt values I did not notice much improvments or even much difference until I stumbled on this discussion http://forums.reprap.org/read.php?262,156806,157207 and this Blog: http://systematictechnology.net/?tag=calibration where I understood that my max feedrate should be around 10mm/s and before it was set to 100 or 200mm/s which was way to high but it did not strike me as Repetier you set filament speed around 100 but mm/min & not mm/s. - 09/06/2013 Some Updates - Demonstrated the printer at the Artilect Fablab Toulouse on the 03/06 (Picture of it being re assembled there). http://artilect.fr/ - Added cable tentioner to allow speed increase without shacking - Insulated the hotend to be able to perform efficient cooling without affecting hotend temperature http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:101104 - Chased play in the wade extruder drive. - 25/05/2013 First Perfect Print ! - As on small part there were thermal issues I decided to test larger prints. - I went for the 6 sided Vase from MaakMijnIdee http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:18672 - Printed with blue PLA 0.2mm layer thickness, 207degC for first layer & 197degC for the others, speed 40% of prusa std settings (5hour print time) - The result excellent :) It will be time to accelerate... - 22/05/2013 Biger & More precise but stil thermal issues - Slightly tightened the belts to improve acuracy - Went for the large Lucy the cat (in blue) with no ventilation & still at low velocity - Low parts where excellent with a good prescision of the layers - One can notice a problem around the head of the cat which give it a frog attitude. This was due to excessive softening of the material & partial colapse. - 21/05/2013 Post mortem & Back to life - Went to see the E-Motion Tech people with my dead J-Head and after post mortem analysis they figured out that the termistor reading was not correct it should be around 90k Ohms and was 120k. They where very kind & helped me to restore the head. - Now back to life calibrating properly the thermistor. - 20/05/2013 The J-Head lost it's head! - Trying to print another lucy the cat after tightening the belt to get a bit more prescision, Extrusion was not going well again. I tried to do a manual extrude, temperature was set @ 210degC, there it felt strange the extruder stepper's seemed to force significantely jumping some steps but the PLA was only going out lazily. - Sudently I the head started to move & poped out before I could stop the mains power. - 19/05/2013 Fighting with the Cat - Today I tried to print something beter than a cube but still relatively small & simple So I went for Lucy the cat http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:24255 which is small & rather low difficulty. - Yesturday wen printing the cube I realised that it required cooling so I installed a PC fan (which was the cause of follow up difficulties) - As you can see on the second row of the picture there has been several failures before getting something that looks like the STL. To make a long story short temperature is measured on the top part of the Brass part of the J-Head hotend, which hsa been a bit isolated with layers of kapton tape. however the tip of the hotend is not insulated and would get some degrees colder suficiently to reach very hygh viscosity of the PLA dramatically reducing the flow. and at the same time cloging the teeth of the filament pushing axis. - Increasing temperature by 10degC & cleaning the extruder was the solution. -