I guess this is more aimed at Ryan, and I’m well aware there are hundreds, if not thousands of people who’ve successfully printed their setups without this, but here we go.
I’ve printed a couple of bits (foot + LockM_Corner) but my pipe doesn’t fit (it could probably fit into the Lock piece if I forced it) though in between printing the foot and lock pieces I found my accuracy was out - I’d thought I dialled that in, am now in the process of doing so.
What’d be nice though, is to have an all-sizes-in-one or three separate templates you can quickly print (~30mins vs 90-120mins) to test fit onto pipe you have already got, or when you’re pipe shopping - even though the pipe I have says 25.4mm OD on the sales sheet, it’s actually closer to 25.7mm OD.
Ironically, I have just realised I could have used meshmixer (or similar) to split off the top half of one of these two prints to get what I’m asking for…
I’ve tried to find the dimensions of the pipe holes in the printed parts but haven’t been successful - I assume the holes aren’t exactly 25.4mm as there’s the crush slot to tighten the part onto the pipe. (likewise I assume there’s enough play in the bearing/bolt/part bolt hole to allow for slight size variations in the pipe.
The pieces for the legs are pretty small and quick. I think printing only the top half would still give you a great idea about how well your tubes will fit.
That is a cool idea. Tomorrow I could try to make some. No the sizes are not exact. They have a small tolerance to account for inaccuracies with 3D printers.
So I gave this a quick go last night and came across an issue.
I sliced the top off the LockM part (so it didn’t include the base/bit you screw through to the X/Y frame holder) and printed it out.
The issue is that the crush split allows an awful lot of movement (it appeared to be around +/-5 millimetres), so it’s almost guaranteed to fit whatever size pipe you’re testing unless you’re being silly - not a good test piece.
I’ll retry slicing the bottom part so there’s less/no flex, but ideally the test hole would just be a hole with no crush split - but also I’ll look at the other parts and see what I can find, I think there should be something on the Z carriage that’s suitable.
You could push the part thru the slicer bed and print just the top inch to do two things. 1 test your settings and to have a part to take to the store with you. Since you know it is already out of whack you could print multiples with each one scaled up 1 or 2 % whatever you think and mark them. Then after test fitting use the one scaled properly to fit.
I tried this, parts with the crush split have a large tolerance due to the split. My initial post (a couple above) was a bit wild stating a 5mm=/- difference, it’s more like 1.5-2mm+/- which is still unacceptable.
As I also mentioned, I could slice out one of the pipe holes from the solid parts in the Z mechanism.
Edit; Nope, I’ve just had another look at the Z axis bits and they’ve got crush splits in them too.
Sure, the problem boils down to the pipe sizing being correct I guess. (assuming a dimensionally accurate printer)
Personally I think it’d still be handy to know the modelled diameter of the pipe holes, but like I mentioned, hundreds/thousands of people have successfully printed the MPCNC, so the problem is mine to solve
