This will mainly be a photo dump with some comments.
The 3D printer arrived last Thursday and I assembled it on Thursday and Friday evening. All told it probably took me about 6 hours from opening the box to plugging it in and moving the table around.
The only real quibble I had with assembling it is that the instructions are a series of videos (not really an issue) but at the beginning of each step lay out the parts you need. The parts are clear acrylic on a white background. It’s difficult to see which ones you need and there are a few that are close to the same, but not identical.
The section about the wiring was confusing. I figured it out but there are steps missing and it’s a bit unclear.
There was a delay on Saturday when I discovered that the version of Linux I had on my laptop was too old to install the controller software on so I had to install a newer version. That took a couple hours of messing about to get that all setup.
Saturday and Sunday afternoon (with a break for a drive in the sidecar) were spent messing about trying to get a decent printed object out of this thing. Man this is a steep learning curve and the information, while out there, is difficult to track down. I did find some good things to try for calibrating the machine though.
I finally got some things tweaked in close, but I’m having an issue with the extruder. I just googled my issue and have something to try tomorrow that should fix that.
Anyway, photos!
This is the box it came in. More photos below the fold.
It came well packed. There were no broken or bent parts. 🙂What’s in the box? Lots of parts. It even came with all the Allen wrenches you need to assemble it!
Lots of acrylic parts. I thought the plastic was pink at first, but it was just the protective covering.Servo motors and electronics. Almost everything has plugs on it so it’s pretty easy to assemble.This is the first sub-assembly. It’s one end of the X-Axis.The sub-assembly for the other end of the X-Axis.The extruder head sub-assembly.The Z-Axis motor sub-assemblies.The print bed mount sub-assembly.The end plate with the belt adjuster.Rollers to put the spools of material on. These do not work worth a crap. I’ll be printing a better spool holder pretty quickly.The end plate with the Y-Axis stepper motor on it.This was the state at the end of Saturday night. Putting the sub-assemblies together was one long video, so I didn’t really take photos along the way.All the steppers are mounted and I’m running the belts.A detail of the X-Axis end with the belt adjuster. All the pieces went together with tabs and slots and captive nuts. Pretty slick.Detail of the other end of the X-Axis. You can see one of the end-stop switches for homing the machine.All the parts assembled, just some wiring to do.What a rats-nest. All the wires were the same length so there was lots of extra.Another view of the wire mess.Much nicer now. They provided the wire wrap, so I bundled up all the mess.Another view of the tidy wiring.It’s alive. Powered up and the display shows the status. You can home the machine using the click wheel, so I did that and all the motors moved the right way from the git-go!
I shot a video of the first part printing. The part didn’t turn out very well, but the machine did work. Here it is.
