Welcome to the SeeMeCNC Community

Before I start, despite the name the only thing i have to do with this printer is I backed it on KickStarter, and I was aware of the designer. The printer is an incomplete kit, there are no electronics provided, and no heated bed, these were both intentional decisions made to dissuade inexperienced builders from backing the initial KickStarter run of kits. I have no idea if Billy intends to continue production outside the initial run, but there is a place on his website to sign up to be informed when additional kits are available.
WARNING as of this writing documentation is still incomplete, and all that exists for what is documented is a video with no voice over.

The claimed build area is 10 inches diameter, the arms will certainly get there, but my guess is in practice it will be closer to 8 or 9 inches.

The Kit itself is very complete, it consists of everything you need for the build minus the electronics and heated bed if you want one. I built mine with an E3D V6 Lite, Duet 0.85 and a heated bed.

Outside of the extrusions, the acrylic black panels around the top and the plexiglass enclosure pieces, the majority of the other parts are made of laser cut Delrin. I've machined Delrin before, and many of the nice properties that it has there transfer over to building things out of layers of it held together with machine screws. There are almost no nuts in the entire build almost everything is build by tapping the Delrin with the provided screws. The Delrin holds up stunningly well to repeated reinsertion of the screws.

The printer itself has a novel linear bearing design, basically the extrusions are the rails and delrin pieces inside the slots constrain unwanted movement, you can see the assembly of them in the videos on the polygonrobotics page. I was somewhat dubious how well this would work, but it turns out very well, the only real criticism I can make of it is the relatively large number of adjustment points that have to be fiddled with to get the tolerances correct.
Because the bearings are inside the rails, the enclosure is incredibly simple, the plexiglass pieces are simple placed in the slots in the frame rails under a small amount of tension, two of the sides have two pieces of plexiglass that overlap slightly, so the bottom one can be slid up as a door.

The arms use magnetic joints and IME so far work well with a caveat (see later)

The Design is very clever, bordering on the over designed in places, the hotend mount for example is probably the most rigid I've ever seen, but your not going to be swapping it out quickly.

The only real problems I've had with the kit have been minor.
I had an issue with one of the magnetic joints becoming disconnected when moving around the outside of the build area, I could see no mechanical interference, and it occurred even after dropping my speeds/acceleration and jerk values to unbelievably low levels. I believe what was happening is that there was enough friction between the magnet and the ball that is literally rolled out of the magnet. I put a dab of lithium grease on the balls and it appears to have resolved the issue.
It's not a quiet printer, not that it's excessively loud, but with the enclosure pieces in place they act like a big sounding boards.
I broke one of the acrylic panels for the top, this was my fault I was trying to test fit something in the electronics bay and flexed it too far, Billy has promised to send me a replacement free of charge.

Overall I'm very impressed, there is little to no slop in the mechanics of the machine, the platform feels as rigid as any delta I've used even towards the edge of the build platform and that shows in the print quality.
The first print I pulled off the machine, all I did was guess at the ESteps value and it is probably the best first print I've pulled off any machine, other than some minor over extrusion which was entirely my fault, it was pretty much flawless, no ringing, perfect layer alignment.
I haven't spent a huge amount of time on the printer yet, but I have printed a couple of 6 inch diameter ABS parts with the enclosure on the printer and there was no warping. I was a bit concerned about heat in the electronics section, but it seems to stabalize with the Duet CPU around 60C which is well within it's tolerances.

Like the simplicity of this design very much! Are those alu top and bottom plates? If the extrusions get cut nicely 90 degrees, I guess there is not much room for disalignment. I would probably have made room for the electronics on top of the top plate instead of below, for the heatchamber to get better separated from the electronics.

The top and bottom are waterjet cut 1/4 inch aluminum plates, mine are very flat, but I think they are extruded rather than cast aluminum. Not that it matters very much for alignment, since the bolt holes will be in the right place regardless.
I was interested in how tower alignment would be, but there is almost no play in assembly, so it's close to impossible to mess up. I'd probably have used a countersunk screw to have it auto align, but it would have required an additional machining operation, and having assembled it without I'm not sure it's necessary.
According to the auto calibration I ran I have less than 0.2 degrees rotational error which is small enough you could not correct for it and still print near the edge of the plate.

The Aluminum extrusions are Misumi, and cut to length by Misumi, They were cust very square. Misumi do offer the option to machine the ends for increased tolerances, but I doubt that was done here because of the cost.

I missed out on the designers previous Kickstarter (the PrintXel), it was a low cost cartesian printer released around the same time as the H1, and from all the prints I saw come off it one of the better printing machines of it's day, at the time most cheap printers had issues with Z Wobble because it was difficult to source cheap straight leadscrews. Billy's design used a belt for the ZAxis which eliminated the issue.

The electronics bay seems to be OK, the acrylic top panels (the ones without the Polygon logo) have cutouts for 40mm fans, I don't have any installed right now but it doesn't seem to get over 60C even with the bed at 110C and I have a largish PSU in there as well as the Duet.
The passively heated chamber has been a bit of a revelation for printing ABS, I new they improved things a lot, but I've never gotten around to putting one on any of my printers.

I'm very impressed as I said, there is a lot of attention to detail in the design. It's not a build in it's current state for a beginner, not that it's a difficult build but without a standard electronics package and improved documentation I think a lot of first time builders would fail.

How is this project coming along?

I completed the build, I still need to print and enclosure for the Panel Due, but outside that it's done.
All I've really added since the last post is a spool holder and a fan bowing air over the controller, mounted in the replacement top acrylic piece that Billy sent out.
I've run the best part of a roll of ABS through it, and miscellaneous pieces in PLA.

Print quality is excellent.

All in all it's hard to find fault, it's my go to delta printer right now, partly because of the enclosure and it's reliability, and partly because of the convenience and quality the Duet provides with it's web interface. The build area is obviously smaller, but I think it's mechanically superior to the Max (at least the V1 and V2's) there is less slop in the motion system and arms resulting in less slop in the platform especially near the outside of the build platform, and it's much easier to construct square.

I find it hard to recommend to a novice builder until the build instructions improve, but if your familiar with the level of torque you should apply with screws into plastic and aren't frightened of the controller wiring and configuration, it's a great printer especially for the price.

You obviously also need to figure out what your going to do for a heated bed if you choose to install one. I used a mill to notch one of the extrusions to run the Bed wiring.

Thanks! The belts are running in front of the extrusions "Kossel Style" don't they?
Can't really find anything about costs and if the still sell.
I am really starting to dislike the melamine construction of my V2...

DeltaCon wrote:Thanks! The belts are running in front of the extrusions "Kossel Style" don't they?
Can't really find anything about costs and if the still sell.
I am really starting to dislike the melamine construction of my V2...

Yes the belts run in front f the extrusions, you tension them by pushing the carriage against the securing M5 bolt and tightening said bolt which seems to work pretty well.
The original Kickstarter kit was $500 with NO ELECTRONICS and $60 option to upgrade to a volcano kit.
I believe Billy is running at least a second batch of kits, it's one of the reasons the build documents stopped being updated, he's one person with another Job, so the logistics of getting kits out leaves him with little time to get the docs updated.

That's a pitty. I think his design deserves a team and professional approach.
That price is really not bad for frame + skates + arms + platform + hotend

DeltaCon wrote:That's a pitty. I think his design deserves a team and professional approach.
That price is really not bad for frame + skates + arms + platform + hotend

Yeah. It really is a lovely and clean design. I personally would love seeing him offer the ability to buy an additional base plate, so that someone could design a stack system to let you have a base compartment of some size as well, for wiring a heated bed or the power supply. Just make it identical, and have some turned spacers or whatever to hold it up. The users can drill their own holes for wiring/ETC if they want. It really is a beautifully simple but extensible design.

Xenocrates wrote:

DeltaCon wrote:That's a pitty. I think his design deserves a team and professional approach.
That price is really not bad for frame + skates + arms + platform + hotend

Yeah. It really is a lovely and clean design. I personally would love seeing him offer the ability to buy an additional base plate, so that someone could design a stack system to let you have a base compartment of some size as well, for wiring a heated bed or the power supply. Just make it identical, and have some turned spacers or whatever to hold it up. The users can drill their own holes for wiring/ETC if they want. It really is a beautifully simple but extensible design.

If you email him he'd probably do that for you. I believe at one point he was considering a base mounted electronics bay.
I modified the frame slightly to accommodate the heated bed wiring, which meant I had to move the motors down 6mm, he offered to custom laser cut some modified delrin pieces to accommodate the change, in the end it wasn't necessary, so I didn't take him up on it.