I am trying to decide what to use for the milled part of my printer. What do you think about using 1/2 MDF? I haven’t worked with that material before but it looks like it might be a good choice.
That is kinda overkill. If you use the bottom part 1/4" will work great for all parts and 3/4" screws will fit nice. Around here there is fancy plywood “Birch” it is in between 3/8" and 1/2" (1" screws). I think I will make my next one out of that so I can put a nice finish on it.
1/4 MDF painted Black? All the 1/4 plywood I’m finding is real wavey and looks kinda warped.
I did see some 3/8 pine plywood that was sanded both sides. Maybe I will use that.
The bottom will/should pull and hold it in place. The other option is 3/8" HDPE or other plastics, that is the one I have in the picture.
1 Like
Menards has 4x8 sheets of 3/8 HDPE for $76. That sounds like a good way to go. Is it hard to work with? What kind of bit did you use? I will have lots left over but I can find something to do with it. Maybe someone on here wants to buy some at cost+ shipping?
Dang that is a great price. Gotta be some people interested.
HDPE is super easy to cut, has to be the easiest plastic.
MDF is flatter than plywood, usually.
Keep in mind that you just need 14" or whatever on the longest dimension, so a 4x8 sheet being wavey is NBD. The parts will also hold it pretty square. I made my first MP3DP out of 1/4" MDF and it is a little less rigid then I would like though. The bottom helped. I ended up installing 1/2" ply front an back and it’s good.
The HDPE is a good choice too though. It cuts a lot like MDF. Just clean up the dust. Little scraps of it are good for sliding parts of homemade jigs too. I don’t know how much it will cost to ship though.
I just bought some 3/8" BB PLY today. I want to design something cool to carve in it first, and I might try veneer, but I love Baltic Birch. It mills great, and the edges look good, unlike the cheap stuff. Plus, cutting the cheap stuff smells like the elephant exhibit at the zoo.
I am going to order the HDPE. There is a special order charge so the sheet will be close to $100. I want to use it for the milled parts on the lowrider I have planned also.
Hopefully it’s stiff enough. The quarter inch stuff I have taco’d under it’s own weight when I left it in the barn. Make sure you store it flat.
I am looking closer at these parts. I like the screws to mount the extruder this time. The clips were neat, but I think I can mount the touch sensor (or move the cooling fan) to these screws (on the back). I am excited to find all the little details that have changed. The location of the Z endstop screw, screws to keep the X axis bars in place…
I think I’m going to have to start another build thread to put all my thoughts down…
BAM:
https://www.v1engineering.com/forum/topic/jeffeb3s-mp3dpv2-the-sequel/
I want to mount a BL touch clone. I got the MK8 extruder from Ryan. Any suggestions on a good way to mount that?
It will have to be a custom made mount, and Ryan’s not a fan of autolevel, so we will have to do it ourselves. I will eventually do it if no one else does, but with my current schedule, I’m probably looking at about mid-late 2018…
Ryan has said this 1000 times, and he’s completely right: You can definitely get the same quality without autolevel. His machines print parts that he sells to pay his rent, so you can trust that advice.
If you just think it’s cool, or you just want autolevel, then someone will have to make the mount. It shouldn’t be difficult, I just take a while with CAD. (((I think it’s cool, and I like the thought of it being leveled, but I have printed a lot without it too, and it’s been fine))).
I mounted my inductive sensor in between the fan and the heatsink on the MK8 extruder. That would work again, but whenever I took off the fan, the height needed to be recalibrated, which is about as bad a manual leveling. This time, I think I will either move the fan to the back, which will free up the fan mount screw for a sensor mount, or I will mount the sensor on the back. The closer you can get to the nozzle, the more of the bed you can measure.
I really like the way the BL touch functions, If I were to add leveling I think it is probably the best option right now. I also agree with the previous statements. The BL seems to cost a bit much, I haven’t had leveling issues on any of my printers ever that required mesh, I really only have to level them after I do something stupid like or a printer rebuild.
I also know if the printer is as square as I can get it and the bed is leveled properly, the parts will be as square as possible (kinda important for the MPCNC). And now in Marlin 2.0 there is a 3 axis skew adjustment. We can now make some seriously accurate parts.
I am tuning speeds and accelerations for the printers now, I usually print at 30-35mm/s for part quality and strength. I was doing tests last night at 50mm/s and the parts looked super sexy just have to make sure they are still strong. The added speed and re-slicing to include variable layer heights should bring print times down enough for me to lower the price of the printed kits a few dollars…I hope. I am having fun with the tuning and how the parts look is important to me, right now the LCD is garbled though…dang it. So no release until I figure out if it was me or Marlin.
I have some nice print tests here, 50mm/s X is looking pretty good, Y needs some more tweaking.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1bhsUZQTsscbJCEaJ8IVZ-QG_IlZiBq7Q
There you go Craig, just send Ryan a BLTouch, and tada!
I could really spend some time tuning the slicer. I just never get it perfect, and whenever I mess with it, I can get one part to look better, but the next one looks worse (or takes 3 hours, which I’m not against).
I have BL touch on my black widow but that’s a huge build plate that’s hard to level manual . I would totally buy a “3d touch” and send it to Ryan if he would make a mount.
Nice test pieces. Just try it at 120mm/s. I’m sure it will be fine.
What screws are you thinking will go into the plastic through the HeffePlate?
Do you think using thicker material for the milled parts would make the frame stiffer and allow for faster print speeds? On the printers I have now I print most of my stuff at 70-80 mm/s and I don’t notice a drastic drop in quality.