Ultimaker 2 pancake stepper direct drive

[Anders Olsson]

Tungsten Filament... you really do the most extreme 3d printing i know of

Well, our plan is to use it for X-ray shielding, slits and sample holders for these kind of machines:

So there is a good reason for printing it, just as for the boron carbide for neutron shielding.
And after all, tungsten is not even close to as hard as boron carbide, so it should be fairly easy to print I think

[Neotko]

:O that so cool

[ivan.akapulko]

Holy cow... 5 RS-485?

[Anders Olsson]

It is a EOS Eosint M250x and did cost a huge sum of money when it was new 100+kg of materials are included.

That material is probably worth at least as much as you want for the printer if it is in good condition, maybe you should start by selling that?

I tried to sell in the printer to our metal printing expert at work by the way and at first she was very excited, having used one of those.
But now she is more like "oh, that old thing has CO2 laser, I want a new one with a fancy Yb fiber laser instead"

Holy cow... 5 RS-485?

Never counted them I think it is regular stepper drivers that are connected through the DSUB-connectors.
I think there are four motors for the sample stage, but there could be a fifth motor hiding somewhere for hight adjustment.

The tungsten filament only comes in 1.75 mm by the way and it is a bit expensive.
So if I am going to print it on the Ultimaker I need to use my 1.75 mm setup anyway.
And some extra precision from a direct feeder does not hurt, when printing things for X-ray machines.

[Meduza]

"oh, that old thing has CO2 laser, I want a new one with a fancy Yb fiber laser instead"

I have heard that there actually is some company that do rebuilds of these old M250's with the new fiber lasers and new control boards, mostly they reuse the powder mechanism and chassis. It does cost quite some money, but still a lot cheaper than the new EOS printers.

Also, some people that was interested in buying it did contact EOS themselves, and got a price for just a retrofit fiber laser, i belive they said it would only cost a few tens of thousand euros...

The thing i would like to do, but really do not have the time to do, is to tear the printer down, cut down half of the chassi to reduce the size, fit a 40w laser inside and use it for printing nylon instead

[nilrog]

You play with too much cool stuff

That metal printer reminds me of an old 3D-printer we went to see at the University in Trondheim back in -94/-95. But in my memory it was bigger than this one, and only printed in plastic, with wax as support, and the resolution was way worse than what we can get at home these days on our UM's. Unfortunately my memory fails to recall the make and model. It would have been fun to see it gain though.

Time, and technology, flies away...

[Anders Olsson]

I finally managed to record a short video showing the instant feeding response when using the direct feeder:

[Neotko]

That's quite impressive (the delay or lack off).

Argg. So much stuff to do and so little time. And now my board heater 1 died pfff.

Anyway, superb!

[ivan.akapulko]

I like it. Is there any impact on the printing process due to the vibration from the direct feed?

[LePaul]

That printer has some miles on it...scorch marks and all!

[Anders Olsson]

I like it. Is there any impact on the printing process due to the vibration from the direct feed?

I don't think the vibrations from the feeder is a problem, but the printer becomes slightly more noisy in the X-Y-movement if running it fast.
It is because the added weight of the feeder I guess, even if it seems to have little effect on the printing quality.
The lack of the beeping sound up on retractions is really nice though! That is easily the most annoying sound on a stock Ultimaker I think.

That printer has some miles on it...scorch marks and all!

Well, it has "only" 2300 logged hours, plus probably another 500 or so before the firmware had the logging function.
I has been traveling quite a lot though, probably brought it in my car like 30 times by now to various places, and I did not put it in a box.
Have been playing a bit with various mods as you probably can guess too, printed at 300 C and so on.

[Meduza]

Have you seen E3D's new pancake stepper driven feeder?
http://hackaday.com/2016/03/30/mrrf-inn ... -filament/

[Neotko]

Seems they do read this and ultimaker forums

[Anders Olsson]

Haven't seen that, thank you for the link, honestly I am only happy if others work on this.
I have way too many projects myself and in my opinion someone should have invented a geared pancake stepper direct feeder years ago.

It is such a simple upgrade with so much to gain, so if E3D, or someone else find inspiration here to design something that works I don't mind at all as we could all gain from having such feeder

[Neotko]

E3d extruder looks nice to get a 3.1 gear on a decent price. The gears alone from misumi would cost almost their price.

http://e3d-online.com/blog/titan