OK, sorry about the drop out there, but had to drive from NJ to Portland, OR to have the bike this is all about at a show, the One Moto show. The show was fun, the drive sucked, but for your viewing pleasure here's a shot of the bike, sans the bodywork that this printer will print.

Lots of other 3d printing in this baby. The first 8" of the exhaust was DMLS printed in 316 stainless steel. The swingarm was sand cast in A356 aluminum in a mold that was printed directly in sand by humtown.com. Same goes for the engine side covers and oil sump, but they are cast in magnesium. The steel chassis lugs were FDM printed in PolyCast filament then investment cast in 4130 steel. Last but not least, the oil cooler mounting brackets were printed on my Anycubic MonoX in Siraya's high temp white resin.

Still making progress, the heated chamber is cut, lined, and just about done.

The next step is laying out the electronics and wiring in the side area. Here are the main connections:

75VDC/1200W power supply for ClearPath XYUV servo power
24VDC/480W power supply for Duet 6HC power

Duet 6HC mainboard
-24VDC power in
-CAN to (2) 1LC toolboards
-OUT_1 to SSR for bed heater
-OUT_2 to SSR for chamber heater/fans
-OUT_3 to E3D water cooler 12V fan
-OUT_4 to E3D water cooler 12V pump
-OUT_5 to internal chamber recirculation 12V fan
-IO_01234 to XYUVZ endstops
-IO_5 to power 5V of EBOB for step/direction output
-TEMP_0 to PT1000 sensor for heated bed
-TEMP_1 to two PT1000 sensors in series for heated enclosure
-DIY soldered connections to EBOB for step/direction
-PanelDue 7i.

1LC XY head
-CAN line
-24VDC power in
-filament stepper motor
-filament sensor
-PT1000 sensor
-80W 24VDC heater
-BLTouch

1LC UV head
-CAN line
-24VDC power in
-filament stepper motor
-filament sensor
-PT1000 sensor
-80W 24VDC heater

I think that covers it all.

The servos and steppers are outside of the heated chamber so should not have overheating issues but if so, I can use the 1LC fan output for a filament stepper fan and the servos have fan mounts on the heatsink that can be driven from the power supply.

The 5/16" ground aluminum build plate and Keenovo 3000W 220VAC heater with silicone foam insulation arrived and will be put aside until the Z mechanism is ready next week.

Final build volume is 700x644x1020.

The next plans are to install the electronics, power supplies, etc. and initial wiring in the side compartment. Then bolt the Z axis in, connect it, and do a rough commission and alignment, then bolt the XYUV in and do the same. Then dig in for some extended tweaking sessions!

@mrehorstdmd said in New heated enclosure printer:

Now the extruder carriage motion is going to try to pull 2m of filament off the spool at 200 mm/sec

Why?

If you consider a situation where the printhead is not printing (filament speed at stepper is 0), the carriage is moving from close to the spool to an extreme position, and the teflon tube is fixed at the spool box and the printhead, how can any filament be pulled off the spool? The filament already occupies the full length of the teflon tube, which does not change length. This is the reason to use a feed tube for the filament. The teflon tube changes in shape from a tall arch when the printhead is near the spool and a squat arch when it is far away, but the arc length of the arch remains the same so all the spool ever sees is the filament feed requirement.

Adding whatever filament speed is needed for printing does not change the situation.

If you have a spool above the printhead feeding down into the center of travels and the feed is a bare filament from the exit of the spool to the printhead, this exposed length of filament does change (pythagorean theorem) as the printhead moves and this would contribute directly to filament tension, causing spool rotation when the distance increases and spool slack when it decreases. This may not make much of a difference on smaller spools, but I think with a 10kg spool it would be a problem.

OK, have Cura 5.0 installed and on a first run it make an improvement, but there are still visible remnants of the ribs. I realized that 'print infill first' was on even though 'print outer walls first' was chosen, so the remnants of the ribs may be due to that.

Here's a shot of the tension arm, it seems to work fine so far, but another mechanical issue has come up. The pivot arms are extra brake levers that had been machined for the motorcycle project.

The small stepper is not up to driving the spool, so a bigger stack is on the way. At 250mm/sec print speed the spool could almost be said to be spinning!

The first mechanical gremlin is that one of the chamber heater ducts points upwards towards the bellows, and i guess softened it, causing it to droop and rub over the top of the part, ruining the print.

I'll make a small deflector duct above the blower (to the left) so it is not blasting directly on the bellows material. I'll also space the bellows up about 1/4" (as much as easily possible without a bunch of rework) to give a little more leeway for some sag without touching the part.

The good news is that the part print (swingarm hugger) looked great up to that point, it is about 22" long with two long thin legs and no signs of warping or bed adhesion problems. It has a flat flange then the main walls and ribbing about .1" thick. I made the front left sloping section solid at 30% infill, the rest of the part was steep enough to print directly with no supports.

Hoping to finish up this bellows stuff tonight and be able to finally run an part unattended.

Round 2 was a success!

Or mostly a success. Definitely a usable part for initial track testing but the print does have some blemish areas.

I added Z hopping at 1mm so there was a ton of z motion going on but it did not affect the print time that much. The Z motor was a lot hotter. I may have to tune the retraction settings now as at some points it seemed to be depositing a tiny drop of material, z hopping to a couple mm away, and repeating for 30-50 times in a row. I am not getting any blobbing or stringing issues, so likely have some margin to reduce retractions.

The added z motion did accentuate the instability of really tall (500mm+) and slender support structures, as you could see them swaying back and forth a bit. Once the printhead was printing on them the motion was quickly damped, but it has a noticeable effect on surface print quality. I think the fast accelerations of the printer are causing problems when the center of mass of the printed plastic for an island is not over its center of support, so when I create these new CAD supports will try to either prevent that situation or try to give the added bracing some torsional stability. I found that adding 1 perimeter wall option to the support generation adds a lot of stability to the support islands, but it also greatly increases print time and support removal difficulty.

I think most browsers should play this video: https://www.instagram.com/p/CfKd1oqDCpV/

The part ran with a bunch of Cura generated supports around a bunch of 3 pass wide brace walls that were added to the CAD model in Creo. The uppermost horizontal walls were a bit wonky as a result of my added walls ending too soon and the Cura supports wobbling a bit. This wonkiness stopped when these islands were merged into the overall part perimeter, which was pretty stable due to the CAD added bracing.

So these parts are all good enough for initial assembly, dyno and track testing, but there will definitely be a round 2 once that all happens. When I do this part again (and actually for some other parts too), the supports will be revised to something like this:

Basically, after orienting the part I will take the edges that are above the build plate, drape them down to intersect the build plate, then thicken them to 3 print passes. This will eliminate any isolated islands on the print bed and it will also convert the part from long, spindly and unstable fingers and supports to a stable closed profile with few supports. The rest of the fairing is about 5mm thick, and done with 2 walls and 10% gyroid infill. The result is that the added walls are 'solid' where they merge into the part so can be trimmed off without breaking through to the infill. The added part volume seems to be a decent amount less than the support structure it is replacing, and because they are usually long smooth print moves can be done at a consistent realized 150mm/sec, so also print decently faster than constantly reversing support movement.

I found that cutting these style ribs off was pretty easy with an oscillating handheld cutters (dremel mm35). No melting and with the right blade shape (standard one included in package) it was easy to get near flush cuts. No nicked fingers, either!

This last print was 52hrs. The printer has been going almost continually since 5/16 with no more than a few hours between prints. I've gone through about 28kg of filament so far. The only failure was the filament stepper fan, which burned out. Turns out it was a 12V fan running at 24V. I may add some shielding between the chamber heater elements and the build plate, as on the previous failed print it did seem that the heater on one side caused some of the single wall tree supports that were directly opposite it to sag. Other than that, the printer has been mechanically sound, which is great.

Happy 4th of July everybody.

Those laydown prints of the front upper sides worked well. Here's a pic of the nearly finished product. All the red, white, and blue body panels were printed out. And the black seat 'pads'.

I'm going to keep refining the slicer settings and printing more parts as I make updates to the design, but for now can consider this a completely successful printer build project.

Thanks to the forum for all the suggestions and to the Duet3D crew for such an excellent product line.

It's been a while, the printer has been working well, but am about to do another run of fairings so am going to try to improve it a bit.

There is some waviness to tall and slender parts that increases as the parts get slimmer and taller in Z. Looking at it while printing, it seems that my construction of a carbon fiber Z carriage works against me in one way. I used high temp CF for its rigidity and low thermal expansion and high enough temp rating. This means that my Z carriage is pretty light, and at high printhead accelerations, can see a slight bit of movement that comes from not enough torsional stiffness of my z-axis rail/leadscrew wended frame. 20+ inch parts can get a visible wiggle at the top as the vibrations die down. I am not interested in tearing it all apart and having to do welding and realignment/reassembly, so am going to try to take the easy way out by putting a large steel weight on the bottom of the z carriage. A heavier carriage means less reaction displacement for a given printhead acceleration, hopefully stabilizing it and reducing the waviness. It is an easily done and undone modification, so pretty low risk.

The waviness I am getting is not stepper induced oscillations as I am using servo/steppers which are silent and smooth.

FYI, from @dc42 on 7/26/22:

The first production 6XD boards are being shipped to resellers this week.

@jens55 OK, thanks. Also received a reply from the BLTouch people:

BLTouch can misunderstand the servo signal when the chamber temperature is over 65C. And an extension to the BLTouch push-pin is a good idea, but because it is not tested I can't surely tell you it might be okay. It might be better that you find a proper weight for your BLTouch by trial and error.

That sounds promising, a tiny CF rod should do it.

Chris

Making some progress with the build. It is all stripped down, the lower section is newly insulated, and the top section has the pass-through hole in the bottom cut. That hole makes it one big chamber for almost 1m of Z travel, 0.68m and 0.72m for XY.

We'll flip it and cut the same hole in the top which the motion subassembly will drop down into and be closed off with a y-axis bellows.

Each motor pair/y axis rail/belt pulley assembly base will be a rigid steel 2x3" angle that will be milled flat and mounted along the top of the housing. Each of these will be carefully aligned to keep everything parallel. The Z axis stage will be a separate assembly that bolts to the back wall of the chamber.

Well, the added weight to the Z carriage seems to have reduced the oscillations a bit which is great.

I am a bit under the gun for our next race outing in October, so looked to outsource some of the fairing parts. So far, 4 out of 4 vendors have refused a quote as the parts are too thin and difficult! They all recommended sectioning them into multiple pieces and gluing together. When I said that the parts have been printed successfully multiple times in one piece on a home built printer, they were very surprised.

On one hand those responses were pretty disappointing. I was expecting that industrial printers would be a step above what I hacked together. They are not. On the other hand it speaks volumes to the quality of product that Duet3D sells and the support from them and other users that is provided on this forum. Many thanks to everyone that has chimed in along the way, @dc42 and @mrehorstdmd in particular.

I've also recently printed a few big, chunky parts that came out excellent with none of the artifacts the tall, thin fairing parts have. I guess I will focus more on bracing for the fairing parts to keep them from shaking during printing. Maybe more retracts will help too. I do notice a little noise when it is doing the infill, which is assume is the printhead hitting slightly high areas of the previous layer. I am also having some issues with the fill areas on the first couple of layers looking really fuzzy, which I think is over extrusion, but I reduce the flow down to about 70% and it looks the same. The parts come out fine and I am still time constrained, so am kicking that can well down the road.

This is a pattern for a carbon fiber gas tank. Printed in two halves and glued together. About 3.5 gallon capacity. There was a slight bit of the print rising up from the build plate, but nothing major and easily taken care of when it is sanded and bondo'd to get a good surface finish to take a mold from. Also doing a mold for a bellypan that is coming out just as good.

It's been a while, the printer has been working well, but am about to do another run of fairings so am going to try to improve it a bit.

There is some waviness to tall and slender parts that increases as the parts get slimmer and taller in Z. Looking at it while printing, it seems that my construction of a carbon fiber Z carriage works against me in one way. I used high temp CF for its rigidity and low thermal expansion and high enough temp rating. This means that my Z carriage is pretty light, and at high printhead accelerations, can see a slight bit of movement that comes from not enough torsional stiffness of my z-axis rail/leadscrew wended frame. 20+ inch parts can get a visible wiggle at the top as the vibrations die down. I am not interested in tearing it all apart and having to do welding and realignment/reassembly, so am going to try to take the easy way out by putting a large steel weight on the bottom of the z carriage. A heavier carriage means less reaction displacement for a given printhead acceleration, hopefully stabilizing it and reducing the waviness. It is an easily done and undone modification, so pretty low risk.

The waviness I am getting is not stepper induced oscillations as I am using servo/steppers which are silent and smooth.

@dc42 Thanks!

With this cold weather we're having my big industrial space is at least 15F colder than it was in spring/summer and the machine is misbehaving a bit. After a bunch of heater errors I had to rerun the heater optimization routines and think the bed 'shape' is a bit off as I am having first layer adhesion problems, but only on the corner of a big part. The first layer extrusion is mostly flat but is roundish where it is not adhering, so think the bed is drooping a bit. My bltouch is fried so I have been manually setting Z, but am not sure about the heightmap file format. I can use a plunge indicator mounted to the carriage to accurately map out the bed, but am not sure how the file entries are mapped to the bed.

For the heightmap file below are the matrix entries, does the first entry of -.094 correspond to (maxX, maxY) or (minX, MinY)? Are rows X and columns Y? Does a negative value mean the print is closer or further from the printhead?

RepRapFirmware height map file v2 generated at 2017-07-21 20:53,
axis0,axis1,min0,max0,min1,max1,radius,spacing0,spacing1,num0,num1
X,Y,-310.00,315.00,-288.00,288.00,-1.00,156.25,288.00,5,3
-0.094, -0.047, -.020, -0.127, -0.18
-0.094, -0.047, -.020, -0.127, -0.18
-0.094, -0.07, -.010, -0.127, -0.18
-0.10, -0.07, 0.000, -0.127, -0.18
-0.10, -0.09, 0.010, -0.127, -0.2

Thanks.

Hmm, IDEX is not as plug and play as I was hoping!

An alternate solution is to repurpose the extra UV Clearpath motors and build a CNC plasma cutter with them. They are more than strong enough to push a plasma gantry around pretty quickly and from what I can see with some friends that purchased stepper based tables, unless you spend well into the $10ks, the Duet control board seems to be a step up, and the Clearpath motors are two steps up! A 4'x4' CoreXY cutter would be pretty useful and more rigid than most of the table setups I see out there.

@dc42 , I saw some older threads about it but there never seemed to be any final results. Did you end up doing those software modifications you were talking about for the torch height control?

https://forum.duet3d.com/topic/8403/advice-on-adding-plasma-torch-height-control/10

@fall-apart-dave @mawildoer @andymidtf
Did any of you ever make it to a working Duet-based machine?

@sebkritikel A rabbit hole is exactly what I am trying to avoid! Didn't see that Merlin firmware part, maybe they've made progress in the past year or 2?

@sebkritikel said in New heated enclosure printer:

Not quite ideal.......

Found this online which says IDEX support so will give it a try:
https://www.bcn3d.com/bcn3d-stratos/
https://support.bcn3d.com/knowledge/bcn3d-stratos-introduction

It is based on Cura so the settings should be familiar, and interestingly enough found a post online relating to native Cura IDEX support:

https://community.ultimaker.com/topic/39303-one-at-a-time-mode-with-idex-printer-duplication/?do=findComment&comment=301971

@mrehorstdmd said in New heated enclosure printer:

@coseng Try printing in wider lines and thinner layers. Prusa slicer will automatically adjust layer thickness based on overhang angle/detail (I think) if you enable it.

Hmm, so you think the bead is falling off the edge of the part before adhering? I am printing the outer wall last to try to prevent that and this part has 3 walls. It is small enough to test with and I can cut off the lower section to get right to the problem area. Maybe higher print temp too to make the bead 'stickier'?

I'd still like to tweak the settings to improve some of the print artifacts that are still happening if I knew what to tweak. Particularly on sloping underside surfaces.

This is a test fit part for a friend's vintage supercharged '53 Corvette that will be DMLS in aluminum from prtwd.com. This was a 4 hr print time. It will be a thin wall tube, but is easier to print as an infilled solid for mockup purposes.

I printed 3 of them and they all had consistent problems in the slightly sloping underside area.

To try to improve the finish of the area over the supports I increased the support roof from 1 to 2 layers and the support top looks nicer, but the part underside looks the same.

And there are print problems that are not above the support area.

These seem similar to the initial problems that were occuring back in the middle of the thread with the red and white panel-like parts. Those problems were never resolved, just avoided by changing the geometry. These parts are not thin or panel-like, but the printing quality problem has a similar look.

@deckingman said in New heated enclosure printer:

That depends on what you want to do.

I'd like the printer to print two copies of the same part at the same time, or print a part and it's mirror copy both at the same time.