As I was studying mechanical engineering I thought that a custom designed 3D printer would be a great idea.
I had some experience with 3D printing in the school where I was running a robotics club. As luck would have it I got an internship in a startup called EDM machinery, that was developing a 3D printer, their main business was designing and building custom CNC Routers.
I took one of their prototype frames and started building on that.
The frame was inspired from prusa and mendel style printers and I designed my first 3D printer around that. The frame had quite beefy Hiwin linear rails which were left overs from CNC router build.
For the brains i choose a RAMBo printer board.
RAMBo v1.3. The RAMBo board is an all in one 3D printer motherboard. It is a full remix of RAMPS design with the Arduino MEGA and stepper drivers all on one integrated PCB. For the hotend I ordered an E3D Chimera dual hotend so I could use two different materials. After I completed my initial design I was eager to start building it.
I also used my school 3D printer to make some of the parts, like x axis gantry mounts, belt tensioners and endstop mounts.
Testing the printer
First moves
First actual print
Second print
I also used my school 3D printer to make some of the parts, like x axis gantry mounts, belt tensioners and endstop mounts.
I was going to house the printer board and power supply on the bottom of the printer, but after I put it together, the Y axis was moving quite the mass and the intersia caused visible layer shifts in the print. So I didn’t finish the printer and that led me to go back to the CAD to redesign the Y axis, but ended up redesigning the whole printer. And after some thinkering i decided to build a Core XY printer instead. I have another post entirely for that project –> ZRK-MEGA.
