The Beast V2 3D printer
I bought my 1st 3D printer. It's a large format fdm self assemble printer. Probably not the best choice to learn on but learning is half the fun.
10 Nov 2019
I received a big box of parts.
17 Nov 2019
Assembling the frame, Y axis motor and end stop
Assembling the x gantry
Assembling the x carriage
25 Nov 2019
Assembling Z axis
08 Dec 2019
The original plans for the printer did not include insulation for the heated bed. After reading some reviews on the printer one of the complaints was it took too long to come up to heat and struggled to stay up to heat. I decided to try and fix that problem by insulating the bed.
beginning to wire
11 Dec 2019
The original design for the XY axis drag chain was to have it run in an orientation that would bind
To fix this I went with a more traditional drag chain set up, one chain for the X axis and one for the Y axis. X axis
Y Axis
24 Dec 2019
The original heated bed came with an 120v AC mechanical thermostat that would have a 10c temp swing around the target temp. I wanted something a little more accurate. Unfortunately to have the motherboard control the heated bed with DC power would take a much larger more expensive powersupply. I opted for a SSD, solid state relay, to control the bed with AC power from the wall socket @120 volts. The benefits are the motherboard can control the SSD with only a 5 volt control signal, Marlin firmware can use PID temp control which can keep the bed within +- 2 degrees c, the bed heats up faster and no need to upgrade the power supply.
When assembling the filament extruders one of the extruders would not push filament. After closer examination of the extruder the tolerances were off on the tensioner, the motor shaft was larger than the hole it was suppsed to spin freely in. I reemed it out and re assembled.
24 June 2020
The original Rumba 8 bit motherboard ran out of memory when I switched firmware from Repetier to Marlin 2.0...so I upgraded the board to a new Rumba 32 board and changed the driver from DRV88 to TMC5160
31 July 2020
The original part cooling fan duct didn't really direct cooling to the part very well so I modelled up a new fant duct in Rhino 3D
05 Oct 2020
The original X gantry had 2 Makerslide extrusions to support mutiple hot ends...that I was never going to use
I removed one Makerslide extrusion to lighten up the gantry
06 Sept 2021
I noticed on lager prints I was getting noticable z wobble
I had seen other printers that use belts instead of lead screws to eliminate z wobble. I updated the z axis with linear motion rails and 15:1 geared steppers. The geared steppers are to keep the z axis from droppinging when the power is off.
I chose to use 3 stepper motors to move the z axis instead of 1 motor and a series of pulleys and belts for the simplicity and the ability to have the printer level the bed in software...but because I added 2 more stepper motors I had to upgrade the motherboard because the current board had 6 stepper driver sockets and I needed 7. I already had a BTT GTR V1 board, which also only has 6 sockets but it also has an expansion board that added an additional 5 driver sockets...time to swap out the board.
1st test print after the conversion....no z wobble!!
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