The Traveled Max2 - Colorado

[aTanguay]

Hi All-

I actually picked up my Max2 at Maker Faire Detroit last year when I was going back and forth between Michigan and Colorado a lot. I shipped it out here and did a few small things to get started, but mainly had to put it on hold while I moved. But now the dust has settled and I built out my workshop, so it was time to put my Max2 together.

Friends would often be surprised that I didn't have a 3D printer because I seem to like all things about tinkering/making and have lots of experience with 3D modeling. Frankly, I haven't been incredibly interested in 3D printers because of 1) print quality (or lack thereof) 2) tiny volumes of most printers and 3) Huge costs. I never saw the need for a $3,000 machine than made misshapen things no bigger than 4 inches cubed.
When I saw the frankly gigantic, nicely made objects at Maker Faire from a Max2, coupled with a digestible price, I was finally in. Plus, like many people say here...they like a build. I backed the Shapeoko years ago and enjoyed putting that together.

So, I've been putting the printer together over the last few weeks and just powered up yesterday. Sadly I immediately blew a fuse on the Rambo during the fan shroud print because of dangling fan wires (or at least I hope that's what happened). So now I'm waiting on fuses from Amazon. Bummer. But, it's part of the process, right?

Hoping to find some good threads here to help me get my printer kicking out things as accurately as it can. I'm hoping to spend lots of time printing and less tinkering, to be honest. I can easily get wrapped up in messing with the tool instead of making with the tool...and I have some things I want to make!


There's nothing super special about my build really, but here's a shot of it extruding what looks like goldfish poop.

[Eaglezsoar]

Yes, you do need to read parts of the forum and put some time into calibration but it is all covered in the assembly manual.
Printing calibration objects is always a good idea and you can find a lot of them on thingiverse.com
Have fun with your printer!

[aTanguay]

I've decided to continue to use this space as a sort of notebook for my experience with my Max2. Worst case scenario, it can serve as a way for me to return to my notes.

[aTanguay]

Today I did the final 'close' on my machine after receiving the replacement 5A fuses for the Rambo board. I blew them out because my fan wires were dangling. Yikes. If anyone is reading this and did the same thing, I bought five and hope to not need them all...I would send out two for karma points.

While I did this closing process, I tested the machine many times by powering it on and off and navigating to the menu where you can home the machine. It worked fine as I went along tucking in wires and such. But then when I went to work with the machine this evening, something was very wrong. When I issued a home command, the print head hit the glass heated bed....a couple times. Not good.

After digging around, I seemed to find people saying something in the settings or eeprom might be bad. So I basically reflashed the Rambo arduino. I used the construction guide for instructions on how to do this. Luckily I saved my settings from my PID temp checks and just punched those back I there. The machine now knows that up means up again.

I'm wondering if the settings were lost because I had to unplug the machine to route the power cable properly. I know that eeprom is supposed to hold things I memory, but maybe things were only held in ram then got lost since they weren't written. I just don't know.

Now I need to redo my calibration for the heated bed. I am not looking forward to this. It was a pain. Ah well.

I have also ordered some noise dampeners for the steppers. I saw a before and after video and was very impressed. The printer may live in the dining room while it's cold outside, so not making a ton of noise would be good.

[Neptune]

Be aware that when you add the dampeners you will need longer mounting screws for the Steppers and you will need to adjust the drive gear to align with the pulleys(you should be able to eyeball this ok). I had to slide my top plate, print bed and all up the rails high enough to get my head in there to see.

Better Luck to you!

[aTanguay]

Thanks Neptune! Great tip....I'll have to score some more. Any idea how much longer?

Sounds (no pun intended) like they're worth it though eh? Really quiets things down.

Thanks again

[aTanguay]

Today's adventure included re-squaring the towers, rerunning the PID stuff, and then doing the four macro calibration stuff over and over. Come to find out I made a rather big mistake when I was putting the towers together. I thought I could adjust them by pulling them up a bit to tilt them over. Stupid.
I adjusted them by essentially pushing on them when they're somewhat loose. I think I got very very close. It's all quite square now. This seems like something that will need to happen quite a bit sadly. I don't thing the whole rig is as solid as it could be.

I squared them to the glass bed since that is what REALLY a matters. Plus it's flatter than the heating bed circuit board. Seemed to help a lot.

I then did the big calibration circle object and got lovely results.

The only real issue is that I am experiencing skipping on the filament feeder here and there. Something is wrong up there. Not sure why, but I need to figure that out. Must be feeding too much....not sure why. Still printing the T-glase.

I also started a notebook today after reading the great thread by a forum member. Seems like a very good idea.

Also need to research how to export my eeprom settings in case it blitzes itself again. Thesesettings are hard won...I don't want to lose them.

[aTanguay]

Settings today were kp 16.15 ki .95 kd 68.89 and horizontal radius 129

[Neptune]

I know they do quiet things down buy you're still dealing with two reverberation boxes top and bottom and I found that most of the noise comes from this and the top box is open so its like a guitar. I have covered the hole just to see and it actually makes a noticeable difference, but it isn't loud to start with in my opinion.

Glad you're having better luck!

[aTanguay]

Another great tip...thanks Neptune.

A guitar...HA!

[aTanguay]

Yesterday's prints went pretty well. I whipped up a ring to hold my NeoLights LED ring from adafruit to test. Sadly I'm getting a lot of skipping on the extruded stepper. I really need to figure this out.

The print came out well, I had just made some design mistakes. That's the point of prototypes eh.

I used scaling to try and remake the part, but that wasn't the issue in the first place. One puzzling thing was that the second print was of very low quality...layers weren't adhering to each other properly and I was able to tear it apart. That was odd too. It's possibly because I popped it off the bed quickly after it was done. But, on the other hand, it had lots of stringies all over the place too. It frankly looked like crap. Huh

I will try cleaning and polishing the nozzle. Maybe that's got something to do with it. That nozzles has been through a lot, what with hitting the bed many times.

[Mac The Knife]

What material are you using, and at what temperature? Also, what speed are you printing at?

[aTanguay]

Hi Mac-

I'm using the T-Glase and the settings from the ini I got from the downloads pages...225C for nozzle temp. I'm running at 100% right now...or whatever the INI set up. Not sure of the mm/sec.

Thanks for any thoughts you might have.

(Forgive the possibly dumb/simplistic answers, I'm still getting started)

[aTanguay]

Today I tried cleaning out the nozzle by heating it to burn out any residue then polished the outer nozzle smooth. I looked up the website for T-glaze for some info. I found some settings that were different than the stock settings from SeeMe. They recommended a slower speed and less heat. So I tried that and made a 20mm calibration cube and it's much closer to 20mm than the last one I made...less shrinkage.
Tomorrow I will try something a little more complicated to see if these new settings help.

[aTanguay]

Moved the printer to a more powerful computer and reprinted the fan shroud with the new slower (14mm/s) settings and 212 degree heat setting suggested by the makers of T-Glase and got some very nice results. Also ran the machine at 70% speed. As one might expect, it took much longer, but it looks much nicer than the very first print I did. I think this might be the best way to use this filament.

Still experienced some stuttering of the extruder for some reason. Just do not know why this is happening.

[Neptune]

just out of curiosity, why did you make the choice to go with T-Glase as a first filament?

[aTanguay]

Pure and utter ignorance!

I was at Maker Faire, picked up the printer, wanted to have some filament to work with, and I think it was on sale...or it was all they had left. Pretty stupid really.

I picked up some ABS from Amazon recently and want to switch over to that...I just need to research the temps and fan stuff. I lost my 25mm fan and am waiting on a replacement. I also need to figure out how to swap out filaments.

[Neptune]

Pure and utter ignorance!

I was at Maker Faire, picked up the printer, wanted to have some filament to work with, and I think it was on sale...or it was all they had left. Pretty stupid really.

I picked up some ABS from Amazon recently and want to switch over to that...I just need to research the temps and fan stuff. I lost my 25mm fan and am waiting on a replacement. I also need to figure out how to swap out filaments.

So ABS temp ranges I've used from 218 at the low end to 230(some go to 235, I've just never needed to). Bed temp 80-110 depending on stiction(my own word, def.- the ability of any item to stick). It helps to have the Peek fan in place and running, just keeps things in a more stable place. You don't really need a fan for the layers if you have your printer tuned correctly. I used the layer fan at one point with ABS because I hadn't figured out my adjustments to retraction yet and using the fan helped stop "stringing" as the hotend moved between islands. I highly recommend calibrating your hot end, there is an article on here on how to do it using a thermocouple for your multimeter and mine just happened to have one so I did it and my reading at 220 degrees was actually 213 so did the suggested adjustments to the firmware and now my temps are within +/- .5 degrees C.

Good luck and let me know if you need any help or have any questions. I'm very new to this 3d printing world but have felt the pain as we all do of learning this great tech.

[aTanguay]

Wow, this is really good stuff! Thanks Neptune.

I will do a more accurate calibration before trying out the ABS. I saw that thread about that here. I don't think my meter has that...yet.
I really want to get in to the ABS...why make work for myself with this T-Glase? Plus, I don't really like the way it looks anyway.

Any chance you'd share an exported ABS settings file?

[Neptune]

Wow, this is really good stuff! Thanks Neptune.

I will do a more accurate calibration before trying out the ABS. I saw that thread about that here. I don't think my meter has that...yet.
I really want to get in to the ABS...why make work for myself with this T-Glase? Plus, I don't really like the way it looks anyway.

Any chance you'd share an exported ABS settings file?

Sure, but their really isn't much to it...the only thing I set statically for each material is the Hot End Temp, Build Plate Temp, Extruder Multiplier, and the Material Diameter(make sure you measure this for each and every spool and take the average and put it in here, this can mess you up and you won't even thing about it as a culprit)

What I'm saying is that you have to kind of calibrate all of these things for each material that you use, because even though you have 4 spools of MakerGeeks ABS in 4 different colors they may not all work the same at say 225C. Red may like it Hotter at 230 and white may like it at 220, never can tell. Also goes for the heated bed, some filament sticks great at 80C and others don't have enough stiction until its 110C. Experimentation is Key! Also right it down if you can't remember and once you have a good working range save a Material with those settings for that Manufacturer, filament type(abs or PLA or ???), and the color in the Material name.

If there is one thing I have learned quickly is that there is no one set group of configs for these wonderful printers and you must be willing to experiment in order to get better quality prints.

[aTanguay]

Gotcha...that makes a lot of sense. I'll start out with these settings and see what we get.

I pulled the T-Glase out of there and will be swapping in the ABS next and giving it a shot.
I also ordered a thermocouple-based thermometer from Amazon to do a right calibration on the hot end.

Thanks again for your advice, I REALLY appreciate it.

[aTanguay]

Ok, it should be SMCNC's policy not to sell T-Glase to newbies! Hahahaha.

I got the ABS going tonight and holy moly...what a gorgeous print. The level of detail is just amazing. I slowed the printer way down to let it move carefully and basically used the stock settings.
NOW I'm having fun.

[aTanguay]

Ok...more than amazing. I printed out a small object I've been designing and it looks just great.
Barring some shrinking, which I'm sure I need to figure out, I am completely thrilled at the level of detail I'm seeing here. From a couple feet away, it looks like something that was injection molded. No stringing...not a lot of missed steps. Just gorgeous.

It does have a bit of flare out at the base...need to figure that one out too. But otherwise, what a difference getting rid of T-Glase made.

[Neptune]

Ok...more than amazing. I printed out a small object I've been designing and it looks just great.
Barring some shrinking, which I'm sure I need to figure out, I am completely thrilled at the level of detail I'm seeing here. From a couple feet away, it looks like something that was injection molded. No stringing...not a lot of missed steps. Just gorgeous.

It does have a bit of flare out at the base...need to figure that one out too. But otherwise, what a difference getting rid of T-Glase made.

That's what I like to hear!!! I have the slight flare at the bottom of my prints also. I changed my first layer thickness to match the other layers and it helped a great deal, but the little bit of flare is still there. I'm working on calibrating my extruder now and I think that is going to fine tune that right outta there.

Keep having fun, that's why you probably bought the thing in the first place!!!

[geneb]

There's a couple of things you can do to get rid of the flare at the first layer. You can print the part on a raft or you can put a .25mm radius around the edges that contact the build plate.

g.