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Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!

nolen posted:

Thanks for the reply! I just saw that there is a CNC mill thread going through DIY and repeated my question in there to get any other insight.

Maybe the answer will involve LASERS and I can finally have an excuse to get all Science Fiction with my sewing.

I didn't see a reply to this. I do have your answer. Fabric, on an industrial scale, is cut by water jet.

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Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!
dealing with internal volumes isn't "hard." LIft the part, allow the fluid to resin to drain several tiems during the process. The more often you lift out, the more "dry" the itnerior will be. It won't be perfect... but it will allow a mostly dry and clean, hollow object.

Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!
I attended, a reprap prusa build this weekend. I also picked up parts for my own prusa.

I watched some 19 prusas near completion when I stopped by to get my bits and peices. :-)

Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!
I just got a Geeetech Prusa i3x. Before I assemble it, is there any advice you can share? I picked up the cork pads for the steppers, in interest of keeping things quieter.

Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!
From the R/C thread.. I was recommended the Geeetech i3x. We're still waiting to see how that turns out..

Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!
What are the critical things about cooling fans? How much do they improve prints? should they have, or do they need outside cooling air if you're in a heated build chamber?

Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!

Nill posted:

Airflow, airflow, and airflow. Outside air isn't important since your chamber should be well below the extrusion temperature anyway.
Switching from a regular box fan to a blower-type fan with a good 360-degree diffuser shroud is probably the best upgrade you can do.
(for corexy style machines, I've seen neat results from side mounted crossflow fans that blow across the whole print layer while keeping weight off the printhead carriage and keeping heat trapped below the air curtain)

Anything in particular you recommend? Is this one of those "your third print should be a fan duct" things.

Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!
well, in a marathon build friday night, I went from a box full of parts, to a complete Prusa i3x. It needs the wiring verified, and cleaned up a little. Then.. comes the smoke test.

I started the build at 11pm. I finished cleaning up around 7.

Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!

Bad Munki posted:

Oh really? I guess for whatever reason I thought it was more or less required in general. Cool.

it helps. But is far from required. the taller the object, the more important it becomes.

Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!

peepsalot posted:

Anyone have ideas for alternative uses for some wildly out of spec filament? I have some garbage 1.75mm PLA that measures up to like 2.25 in places.

Ballast? Really wirey hair for a wig? beads to fill a weighted blanket? The worst taco filling ever?

Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!

Bad Munki posted:

On a related note: OP is hella old, what're a few goon-preferred sources for filament these days?

http://atomicfilament.com/ This guy is in the US, makes the filament in the US, and is absolutely fanatical about filament quality.

Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!
http://hypecask.com/portfolio-item/deltatower/ Well that's a website or it..

Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!
So... I just managed my first few successful prints.

What I've learned:
Book learn'n is useful learning for 3d printing.
Octoprint's slicer is AWFUL.
Printing is very slow.

I've been using a Prusa I3 mk3 at the local hackerspace. It's been a wonderful experience. I've printed a bunch of camera mounts for my tiny whoops (65mm quadcopters..) a whole bunch of RC car parts (Setup wheels, body trimming guides, fan ducts, suspension parts..)

So other than going "Now the toolchain isn't 4 programs long, this is awesome". What's my question?

What's the smallest 3d printer that's on the market now? I was looking for the acrylic printers that HobbyKing sold.. but they're not on the market anymore. I want something to have on my computer desk.

... and I need to finish my Geeetech i3. Sadly, to make it clean, and pretty, I need to extend a bunch of the wires.

Also, is it reasonably easy to add bed detection to ~other~ printers, like the Prusa i3 has?

Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!
Nothing is noisier than an open plan office. Consider this a protest. :-)

That also ties into the microplastic thing... I have two high production laser printers in the same air volume as I am in, the printer dust off of those would swamp anything off the printer.

I looked at those.. and they seem bigger than the itty bitty ones hobbyking used to sell.

This one in particular: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZU9RFNzeX04

Hey... looks, it's open source: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:701548

Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!

duffmensch posted:

I’d get the Delta since it’s cheap as poo poo and has auto bed leveling (unless you want to spring for the Mini Pro), even if you do lose 10mm in all 3 axis.

I think that's the way to go. I appreciate the advice. Auto bed leveling is a massive quality of life thing for 3d printing.

Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!

insta posted:

It's a 5" square bed, why are people so loving hung-up on auto leveling? I have a guy at work who's shopping for a 3D printer and will not consider anything but one with an auto-level bed.

Becasue 0.1mm is .004 inches. This is something you can't easily spot. And it makes a big difference. The defualt prusa "first layer" is 0.2mm. Being off by just a little, makes a rather large difference.

Bed leveling takes time. And if you don't check it every time, you need to wait until you fail a print to know it's wrong.

Auto bed leveling completely removes the "my bed isn't level" reason for prints failing. And it removes all of the time calibrating the printer. Heck, the prusa software even compensates for frame racking.

We have plastics (PLA, PETG) that just kinda "always work". We have extruders that are dead reliable. We have frame designs that are consistant. The last bit, is giving the printer a way to self calibrate... Then the only thing left, is cleaning the bed.

I use a set of 3d printers at the local hackerspace. For me to print, all I do is insert my filament, purge the nozzle, and go. I've not needed to calibrate anything. Ever.

Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!
I've not even set it up, and I'm printing out parts to improve my Monoprice Delta Mini.

I'm printing out the base covers, and spool holder slipper. ... Not that I'd really do it this way, excepting I had to print stuff "now" and I'm not one to waste bed space.

Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!

Sagebrush posted:

No, for cost savings (22 cents of plastic on a $1.13 part).

Could also be for injection molding reasons. Variations in part thickness makes injection molding HARD. Variable shrinkage shows up on the outside of the part, and on a high end car part, you don't want to see the shrink marks. Or craze marks.

Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!
Oh boy, I have a lot of questions. Jump to the end if you just wanna answer those.

First off, My Monoprice Mini Delta works. I can put filament in, and get "something like what I wanted" out the other end.

I've done all of my printing with PETG. I think I've gone through 500g of it so far. Four benchys, six stringing tests, a mostly failed ras-pi case, delta dirt guards, two x-y-z cubes, and two failed riser foot prints, and a very nice vase.

So, I've got stringing problems, out the wazoo. PETG is leaving a fine web everywhere it goes. Sometimes, it even starts to ball up and leave snot balls on the thing.

I also have some homing issues, where the printer will make the first layer to thin, and I"ll end up with snotballs, and the printer triggering the homing switches.

In the process, I also managed to lunch one of the printing pads. Thankfully I bought backups for that.

QUESTIONS:

I think the homing issue, is a cooling issue, and I'm addressing that by making the tall feet to provide cooling to the mainboard and motors. Does that make sense?

My big one, is how do I handle PETG stringing? I've tried from 200deg, to 260deg, and the stringing remains about the same. Setting retract anywhere from the stock 5mm to 9mm has had no real benefit. Also, changing extrusion from 100 down to 80% has had ~some~ effect, but under-extrusion has.. it's own fair set of crap that goes with it. At 90% It still looks good, but has slightly less stringing.

So.. what should I try?

... Tonight's project is re-slicing and trying the legs again.

Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!

Sockser posted:

You can reduce stringing with PETG, but you’ll never completely eliminate it.

AFAIK it’s the whole reason that ABS isn’t completely obsoleted by PETG— ABS still looks nice.

ABS is a ever loving pain in the butt to make work right. I don't know if I"ve ever gotten ABS to play nice for me. Like, ever.

Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!

Acid Reflux posted:

One other thing to look at is your non-printing travel speed. The faster you can get the nozzle from the end of one line to the beginning of the next, the less time the filament will have to ooze out and string. Or at least it might help to make thinner strings. Like the others have said though, it's just kind of an inherently goopy material.

I'm down to mostly some really whispy stuff. If I get down to the 90 or 85% extrusion, I even lose most blobs. I think, it might be time to try to get ABS and PLA working on this printer. If I'm not going across gaps, PETG is pretty awesome. Strong, shiny, flexible.

Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!

ImplicitAssembler posted:

I do the same when switching from Nylon to PLA. Extrude a bunch at 250, switch the temperature to 215 and continue to extrude as it cools off.

That's how I do it. Push the new filament in at the old filament temps, until it's clean.

SPEAKING OF WHICH. I may know some of my stringing. I was doing a bulgy print for doing vases. .7mm width, through a .4mm head. ..... And then I tried doing my stringing tests without resetting to .4mm width through a .4mm head. No wonder i'm getting some really awful prints.

*shakes head* gonna try a few things tonight.

Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!
As a guy who does r/c cars .. in a moderately serious way..

OpenF1 is terrible.

A guy brought an open F1 car to the r/c track last year. It made.. maybe ten laps before it kitted itself. Not counting the other crap it dealt with.

The lack of a rear pod is a big issue.

.............. that said, I will print one.

Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!

Rexxed posted:

My last RC car was a GI Joe Crossfire in the late 80s so I'm probably going to make this thing go slow with a spare crappy motor as a proof of concept kind of thing. I suspect to get real RC car reliability you'd want something besides fasteners screwed into PLA. It's neat looking, though.

According to CNC kitchen, screws straight into PLA is ~almost as good~ as the best press in fasteners. poo poo. most of the screw holes on tamiya cars are screws directly into ABS, Nylon, and Polycarbonate (depending on the color of the plastic..)

My biggest problem with OpenF1, is the impression it can give about what R/C can be. It's not a deep problem. :-) Just like.. annoying for someone who wants to help his primary hobby.

I should go dive into that thing again. I wonder if a real hard-case battery will even fit it. I know I have all the parts to build it out. Heck, I even hvae TPU.

Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!

N17R4M posted:

Ordered us a Ender 3-Pro today because I managed to snag one on a sale, should arrive in a few days. May god have mercy on my soul, time to watch every tutorial under the sun.

Download CHEP's leveling program. And his profiles.

The bed leveling screws are m3. That means the threads are 0.5mm per turn. That's a useful number to know, if you're getting "contact" between the filament and the print head, you know you're within about half a milimeter. If you're getting the popping noise, and the "it's color, but not a layer" coming out of the extruder, half a turn will put you right at .25mm bed clearance. I do most of my "freehand" adjustments with 1/8 turns.

Order the yellow springs for the bed, and a metal extruder.

https://www.amazon.com/Creality-Capricorn-Upgraded-Pneumatic-Bed-level/dp/B081DN6RM2/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=ender+3+metal&qid=1582661048&sr=8-4 This is a good option.

Your first print should be a wheel for the extruder. It makes loading filament a lot easier.

Keep some isopropol alcahol and some paper towels for cleaning the bed of your finger grease.

Everything else is gravy. :-)

Also.. get some PLA or PLA+ to start off with. Once you've gotten used to those.....

Nerobro fucked around with this message at 21:10 on Feb 25, 2020

Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!

armorer posted:

This is the assembly video where he constantly talks about squaring things up as he goes:
https://youtu.be/me8Qrwh907Q

*snip*

Edit: I suspect that he tried to make these videos using a minimum of additional equipment for assembly. I had 1-2-3 blocks and feeler gauges on hand, so I used them for squaring and leveling.

Ugh. I'm not even sure how you'd square or level a ender 3 without $50 in extra poo poo. I just did the usual "slow tighetning, and wiggle" process that you use "in general" when doing complex assemblies, and ended up with a very square rig.

Ambrose Burnside posted:

holy loving poo poo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go8woPGOggg

yeah this dude is singlehandedly making me walk back my (generally unimpressed) assessment of even prosumer-grade FDM printing for mechanical purposes. never gonna be IDEAL, but adapting rigorous engineering/design principles to the medium properly can evidently compensate a lot more than i assume

People who understand how to engineer things for production, and the limitations of materials are.... so rare. So very rare. I'd put 95% of the things on thingiverse being objects that people didn't actually think about how they're printed. With maybe 30% that are "reasonable" to print, by luck. Not by design. When you find things that are well designed to be printed, it feels so nice. They just work...

Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!
The practical difference between the Pro and the normal is big. The rail the bed runs on is twice as wide, this halves the forces on the carriage wheels, and makes it something like 8 times stiffer about the Y axis.

I would go pro, over the normal ender. Especially if I planned on using the whole bed.

SPEAKING OF BEDs. The first glass bed I bought, was for a printer I've never used.

Something like 4 years ago, I bought a Geeetech i3 printer. Black acrylic, prusa i3 style, you get the idea. I mostly built it in one night, over 8 hours I got everything bolted up, and mostly plugged in. Excepting wire management and the last six wires. Well.. with the pandemic, I've been having a friday night hangout with my friends, and we.. do stuff. My buddy did some gunpla, another did some lego, I was working on a model plane, but I got bored of it, and I was threatening doing something with my first "complete" printer.

I had to figure out where exactly I left off. To that end, I started the wire management. One of the very bad things about the Geeetech instructions is that they're mostly video, and they don't show the wire routing well. I discovered that I hadn't hooked up the X axis end stop, or either heater. Also... I had hooked up a few of the connections wrong. But after confirming everyhting, and building a "mostly ok" loom of the excess wire I dared to plug it in.

The power came on. No smoke came out. And the temperature sensors all said "about the right temp". .... Then things went wrong. Turns out that the Y axis stepper had to be reversed. When it went to home, it tried to home on the wrong side of the gantry. Hah. That was a simple wire swap, and then the thing would home. Homing is good, but what about calibration?

The Geeetech i3 is a dual Z printer, which has... it's problems. In this case, I discovered the non drive side rod was 1.6mm higher than the drive side. Also, they decided that restraining both ends of the Z screws was a good idea, so the very slightly wobbly drive side screw makes the whole gantry wiggle a bit. Where the screws passed through the top plate, they also squeaked, and pulled on the steppers, so the height was.. moving quite a bit. Leveling the gantry, a bunch of teflon lube, and just brute breakin have taken care of most of the Z problems that I can see just "as an observer".

Then I leveled the bed. I ran some GCODE I had for my Ender 3 in it. And... it mostly worked. I'm going to need to do a full run of calibration prints, but I think I've got a new printer. "new".

I think this one will end up being a dedicated TPU/soft stuff printer, as it's direct drive.

So.... it's currently a 12v printer. And it has no part cooling fan. Part cooling is going to be my next print. I have a stack of fans, and I'm quite happy to add that to the mix. I'm looking at the thing, trying to figure out what would need to happen to go 24v. And I think, it's just swapping fans out. We'll see if I am ambitious enough to try for that.

I've found electronics enclosure prints, and that will likely be the ~next~ thing after the part cooling fan.

Hopefuly I can find a place to set it up.

Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!

Aurium posted:

A closed loop system can compensate for it, but it's much better to have appropriately sized components. Your peak currents are much higher and your failure modes become much worse. Your power supply might run out of instantaneous headroom.

The main board may not be rated for 24v as well.

the whole thing that made me consider the change.. was the GT2650 board is rated for 24v. In theroy, the PWM will handle the bed and heater.... They take MINUTES to get up to temp as it stands.

We'll see. I have a habit of not "fixing" things that aren't broken.

Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!
They do, I hadn't considered tweaking the voltage up a bit. I'm going to calibrate the thing, then that'll be on the menu.

Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!
Best thing ever.

Baking TPU makes lovely prints, not lovely.

My oven will happily hold 170degF which is enough to drive off the water. And my TPU prints went from "OHMYGOD what did you do?" to three steps from forbidden candy.

.... i'm happy.

Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!
I'll get some photos tonight.

220deg, 5mm retract, 60mm/s, 50deg bed, on buildtak. Still stringy, but not "lets unearth a tomb" stringy.

Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!
I'm getting that itch to do something stupid.

I really want a makerbot, or clone of a makerbot thing-o-matic with the automated build platform.

I'm willing to buy a crappy chinese clone too. :-) I can't find ~anything~ on ebay. So... do any of you wanna unload something, or know where one is?

Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!
1: Make sure the frame is mostly square.
2: PID tune hot end, and bed.
3: Calibrate e-steps.
4: Level the bed, don't worry to much.
5: Print a 20mm cube, to check actual size. or my prefered 10-20-40 block. Calibrate x-y-z e-steps accordingly.
6: print a double wall cube, to check extrusion.
7: benchy, look for problems.
8: Print a speed shape, see what speed you can run the printer at. (this is quality of life, as faster printing, is always better. You can't get back time.)

Temp tower, retraction tower, should be the same thing, and is a "per filament" thing, not a "printer setup" duty.

Truth is, when I get a new printer, I run a 10-20-40 shape, and a benchy, and look for problmes. If we're ok? we're ok. and I go from there. I look up the specs for the speeds it should handle, and try a few speedy runs.


Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:

Ok my dudes, I am putting together a small list of tests/random poo poo to dial in a printer, so feel free to add to this list.

1: calibrate your e-steps
2: level the bed, then level it again, and then one more time.
3: check your extrusion multiplier by printing off a single wall cube (minus the top)
4: temp tower
5: retraction tower
6: benchy

Sound like I'm missing anything important? I'm so used to just randomly loving with my machine that I know I can easily overlook something I had to do once or two when I was getting the printer up and going initially.

So, what other stuff would you do to dial in a printer?

Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!

BMan posted:

do not do this

Belts stretch, they're not completely rigid, as you put load on them, they change length. This means each tooth that travels over the pulley is "slightly more" than the prescribed belt pitch. Printers come with bad e-steps from the factory. (Depending on the axis, my MPMD printed 1 to 1.5% small on all axis, this scaled with the part.) That said my post was.. less extensive than it should have been, this is a place of discussion, explain why, then lets figure out the answer.

That said, "math" on items like belts, isn't as good as an actual set of calipers. The leadscrew isn't going to be off. HOWEVER, the number of people with wrong e-steps is a frightening number.

Then the rest? It's a question of "are you fixing it in the slicer, or the printer". I prefer the printer, so my fixes are slicer independent.

Kfactor? sure. Add that to the list But that's a per-filament thing. Linear advance has it's own set of problems.

Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!

The Eyes Have It posted:

Wait, isn't avoiding those things the reason timing belts were invented? I'm not a nuts and bolts guy but I thought the reason timing belts existed was because they do not "stretch out".

They maintain time, so positions are completely repeatable. They also, when tensioned properly, are completely without slop. I was going to say the teeth prevent slip, yet.. they do not. As you apply load to a belt, it does "get a little longer". As the teeth roll around the drive pulley, they slip to match the tooth pitch. Where this matters on a prusa, or (in my case) the ender, is as I apply tension to the belt, and it stretches, it becomes longer. So a given number of teeth driven will go further linearly, as you get further from the drive pulley. This, if my measurement is right, comes to a couple milimeter across the bed of my ender 3. Small as a percentage, but this does mean belt tension ~also~ changes effective esteps. (In my case, it's about .5% for the current tension across my ender 3)

Wider timing belts would help. Or, one could print a part, reset e-steps, or note how much you need to enlarge or shrink a part to get an accurate part.

Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!

Sagebrush posted:

Good timing belts don't stretch. That would defeat their entire purpose. They aren't just about keeping the number of teeth constant; in something like a car they ensure that the crankshaft and camshafts always maintain the perfect angular alignment relative to one another. If they stretch (and have the slack taken up with a tensioner) the timing will be off and your engine will misfire.

Proper timing belts have extremely strong polyester or aramid (kevlar) cords running through them, and the rubber is really just to form the teeth and bind the cords together. The cords do not stretch any noticeable amount when under the proper amount of tension. Cheap knockoff belts may skip the cords or use something more elastic, sure. Don't buy cheap knockoff belts. If your printer came with them and they're stretching, replace them.

No. All materials stretch when placed under load. No it wouldn't defeat the purpose. *sighs* In a car, they use a belt tensioner to apply a known belt tension so they can depend on that belt being a given length. They also route the belt so more of the belts stretch is going to be on the non critical side of the belt. (the return side.. you'll also notice that timing belts for cars are much longer on the return side....)

Yes, the timing belts we use have polyester or amarid fibers in them. But there's remarkably little fiber in the belt. Using the same belts, in r/c we end up grinding off the back of the belt to reduce hysterisis. There's a comparatively large amount of rubber compared to actual belt. Polyester and amarid fibers are very strong, but there's not much in our 6mm wide belts.

I've not had a belt failure yet on a printer. So, it's evident i'm not over tensioning. The belts aren't losing tension, so the fibers are in good shape. But applying proper tension, still stretches them a little.

Because looking up data is better than "well logic says".... lets see what a manufacturer/reseller has to say. https://www.sdp-si.com/PDFS/Technical-Section-Timing.pdf we usuallly use 2mm gt3 belts. Because we're using these belts as registration, that means the minimum is close to 6lbs of tension. (page t-30) section 9.9 indicates "Belt Elongation: Belt elongation, or stretch, occurs naturally when a belt is placed under tension. The total tension exerted within a belt results from installation, as well as working loads. The amount of belt elongation is a function of the belt tensile modulus, which is influenced by the type of tensile cord and the belt construction. "

Sadly, in the paper I was unable to locate "how much" polyester is in the belts. We'll see how much my belts are stretched tonight. :-)

Nerobro fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Aug 11, 2020

Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!
That graph is about repeatability, not dimensional length of the belt. And these belts are very, very good at getting to the same place time and again.

Belts are not rigid. They get longer when tension is applied. That's how materials work.

I'll go measure my belt stretch right now. Just to shut this down. I can probably get good numbers down to the 0.1mm.

quote:

If we go further down the list, we find



2.5% elongation at break. Across 457mm you'd be seeing a maximum stretch of 11mm if you were pulling the belts hard enough to snap them in half. Everything else in your printer would fail well before that point. I don't know the diameter of the cords in a GT2 belt but with a tensile strength of 350,000lb/in2 I don't think the 6 pounds of tension is causing any significant stretch.

Your errors are coming from somewhere else, I think.
For our belts, the minimum tension for positional accuracy is 6lb of tension. I suspect i'm more up around 20. We'll see. No, we don't know the crossectional area of the cords.. but we could probally calculate it. Hah! That's 542lbs/sqmm But that's solid, and threads aren't solid.

The belt length on my printer is about 750mm. But that's doubled over, so figure 360mm is a better number. I'm not saying 9mm, i'm saying more like 2. But I haven't had the chance to go down and measure yet. :-) we'll find out soon.

Nerobro fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Aug 11, 2020

Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!
So, real numbers.

To get access to good points to measure, I had to take my X belt cover off. This means I had to remove all tension from the X belt.

To measure the "light tension" length, I pulled it tight enough that it had no sag. So, with "about 2lbs" of tension on it, it was 9.22mm.
I then put my usual tension on the X belt. It's now 10.59mm.

That's significant. So, it's not 2mm. It's still 1.3mm. But it is 1.3mm across 240mm of travel. "I" notice this, "I" measure this. I don't get the impression that most people do.

I don't ~have a problem~ with my printers. I'm saying if you want a well tuned printer, measure it, characterize it, and measuring the ACTUAL travel of X Y and Z is part of that. "YOU" said "don't do that" and that's bs.

When I fixed the X-Y-Z of my MPMD, I used the 10-20-40mm cube, because it would tell me what the error was. Was it extrusion width (the same errror at all sizes) was it printer accuracy (errors on both side of the line) or scaling (off by the same percentage at all sizes). It wasn't hard. Took only two 40 minute prints, and now I turn out dimension-ally accurate prints from my delta.

Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!

Karia posted:

Uh, 542lbf/mm^2 is a lot of tension. That's like 350000 psi, I think you miscalculated, or meant lbf/in^2, not mm^2.
No, I made that calculation correctly. Yes it's messy, but the belts are metric, and annoying the input data is in imperial. Yay *rollseyes*

quote:

Fermi estimate here: the minimum cross sectional area of a 3GT appears to be somewhere around 0.009in^2. For a tension of 6lb, that indicates that it's under a stress of about 680 PSI. Let's assume that maybe 1/4 of that cross-section is Kevlar and the rest has functionally zero elastic modulus.
Far less than 1/4 of that is kevlar. Realisticly, maybe 1/4 of the area that contains fiber at all, might be kevlar, and that's going to be less than half the crosssectional area of the belt. So it's closer to double, or three times the stress there.

quote:

That means the Kevlar is under about 2700 PSI of tensile stress. Dividing that by the elastic modulus of 18e6 PSI gives a strain of 0.000151, or 0.015%. That's 50 times lower than your 0.5% number. For a 360mm span of belt, that's about 0.11mm (assuming tension is only applied to one side of the belt, otherwise you'd have to multiply area by two and then the strain is even lower.) That sounds about right.
You're assuming kevlar. It's unlikely kevlar, and likely polyester.

quote:

Now, I made a ton of estimates here, but a belt stretch of 0.5% is... higher than you should have. Like, a lot higher than you should have. Yes, everything stretches. But somethings stretch so little that they can effectively be modeled as not stretching. Belts generally fall under that category for the sort of loads you're talking about here. It's like saying the floor bends down when I stand on it. Technically true, but completely irrelevant to day-to-day life.
Good ballpark estimates. These belts stretch.

House floors move a remarkable amount when people walk on them. While irrelevant to day to day life, they do move distances measurable with a tape measure.

To bring this back around again, if you're setting up a new printer, print a test part, and measure it. Preferably, one that tells you useful information about the actual size your printer is printing.

Nerobro fucked around with this message at 22:52 on Aug 11, 2020

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Nerobro
Nov 4, 2005

Rider now with 100% more titanium!

Sagebrush posted:

It would be much simpler for you to just report how far off your calibrated e-steps are from your theoretical e-steps?

Why? The point is, setup your printer mechanically, and then check it. Why is the idea of checking it controversial? The idea of going "I have 200steps per revolution, and a 20 tooth pulley I have no need to check it in the end" is... well enough for a lot. But the question that started this was "what should someone do", and you absolutely check.

Or am I missing your argument?

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