Rapman 3.1 Build Log
I have received my rapman, and after Phil's step by step, I decided to offer a similar log for yet another 3D printer.
I went to the Rapman because the uk seller is "closer" to me, and an european seller simplifies a lot the customs aspect.
I purchased the double head no solder kit.
Waiting for the delivery I studied the bitsfrombytes forum, and Phil's experiences, so I kept the loctite far away..
The manuals are well done, besides a couple of imperfections. On the website are available print manuals, 3D pdfs of all the steps, 3Dpdfs with assembly animation and a couple of videos. All in all a very well done documentation. I really like the 3D pdf, and I made some in the past. Using them is always a nice experience.
Anyway first thing I did with the new kit was to fry the power supply, probably I didn't plug the power AC cable well enough, but the power supply fried at once.
I had a PC power supply handy, so I was able to use it and power the board, and update the firmware.
I'll attach the pictures in the next post.
Massimo
I went to the Rapman because the uk seller is "closer" to me, and an european seller simplifies a lot the customs aspect.
I purchased the double head no solder kit.
Waiting for the delivery I studied the bitsfrombytes forum, and Phil's experiences, so I kept the loctite far away..
The manuals are well done, besides a couple of imperfections. On the website are available print manuals, 3D pdfs of all the steps, 3Dpdfs with assembly animation and a couple of videos. All in all a very well done documentation. I really like the 3D pdf, and I made some in the past. Using them is always a nice experience.
Anyway first thing I did with the new kit was to fry the power supply, probably I didn't plug the power AC cable well enough, but the power supply fried at once.
I had a PC power supply handy, so I was able to use it and power the board, and update the firmware.
I'll attach the pictures in the next post.
Massimo
Comments
It's also fun to see the Builder forum become a place to track ongoing projects. Hopefully we're doing what Bump expected us to do.
Ken Gracey
I'll try to make a complete report of the Rapman, and of the modifications. After all a heated bed calls for a PID propeller project..
Please check the pdf 3D, I believe they could be of interest for you.
By the way there is at least another propeller user in the Rapman forum, and a big contributor on the obex, by the way (is F32 ringing a bell?).
He's writing a code generator which is more or less 60 times faster than the default tools.....
Anyway please find attached the pictures of the packaging.
I received two packs. One containing the spools, and the other containing all the components of the printer.
The acrylic components are mainly 8mm thick, with two little subsets, one 3mm and another thicker and in perspex.
You can also see the motors, the rods, the board still in a polystyrene box, and the nuts and bolts box.
The latter is composed of numbered bins, but in the single bin you can find different components (bolts of different length, for example).
Two of the 8mm acrylic parts have holes to trim the printer dimension, but on the side there also is a bolt gauge, to sort the right dimension at once. This is a real time saver.
Included are also a couple of test parts, just to get a feeling of the tightening limits of the material.
Peeling off the protective cover of the acrylic is quite a time consuming task...
The acrylic corners are made of 3 parts. The horizontal rods are blocked by two of the acrylic components, each. The vertical rod is the most complex to fix, even with a good allen key.The space is limited and the little screw inside the M5 bolt is not easy to reach. Even if the acrylic is a good 8mm I feel a little bit uneasy.
There are printable replacement corners available.. They are on top of my print list.
They are mado of two V shaped acryplic parts, bolted togheter in the center.
It is for sure a space saver on the acrylic sheet, but the diagonal contuinity is compromised.
Anyway it looks it works, and in my case I started the tests on the table in the pictures, and it proved to be the weak spot..
I then mounted the X motor with the hot head carriage.
I should have skipped this last step, because the dual head assembly requires a different adater, so I had to unmount it and substitute with the dual head adapter. A little flaw in the manual I would say..
I the mounted also the Y motor.
The one semi secluded on the left is the X motor, while the one attached to the rod is the Y motor.
All this went well.
Next steps are harness and hot head.... which proved to be a little bit less satisfactory.
Moreover the wires are supposed to pass trough holes in the board, close to the terminals, but in my opinion they are too close. Ok... maybe I'm too picky..
The other problem I had, besides the power supply, is a crack in a perspex part.
Thi is part of the extruder support, and is a 8mm perpsex, it was shipped with opaque protective cover on both sides, so it was impossible to spot before peeling off the film.
According to the manuals it could be used cyanoacrylate glue, and after a test on a dummy part I decided to pour a little bit of superglue on the crack. Fortunately it is not in a crytical area, and I hope it will work...
I then assembled the two hot head and the dual head adapter.
As usual the harness is not completely satisfactory (maybe it's me..). I also added an external relay board to drive the heater, because it looks the FET on the board are not wide open, and they tend to warm up. The FET on the other hand are fully protected (overcutten, overtemperature and so on), so the risk is to never reach the target temperature.
I didn't trim the harness, just to have room for future modifications.
And at this point the job was (almost) done!!
I checked the bolts, and went to the bed calibration. The manual offers a precise walktrough, and in little time I was able to load an ABS filament on the first extruder and run a test raft..
I got the penny bottle opener stl from the web, prepared the code with lonesock's slicer and fired it...
IT works!!!
To get there it took a little bit less than a week. Some of the most time cosuming tasks are peeling off the protective layer from the acrylic, and sorting bolts, washers, and so on.
Useful is to have a printed manual, and a PC handy with the 3D handy to verify the orientation and the assembly of the parts.
Mandatory are the suggested tools (Allen keys and so on..).
The printer was moving a lot on the table, so I placed it on the floor, and now it looks better.
I loaded the PLA as second filament, and started building a replacement gear.
This time I used the provided beta software, to take advantage of the double material.
The PLA has been used for the raft, and while it it was difficut to remove it from the base plate it detached perfectly from the ABS gear.
Unfortunately the top of the gear presented some problems.
Time to fine tune....
For the corner assembly, the Prusa has a nice alternative style mount. I drew up an alternative for my planned micromendel http://forums.reprap.org/read.php?4,57039
Maybe you can get some ideas for a simpler printed corner assembly. Of course, using flat acrylic poses a different set of problems.
I am interested to hear how the hot end feeders work as time progresses. They look quite smart!
The gears I'm printing are from the same user, and they are intended as a replacement of the acrylic gears. http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4650
True, brand new the acrylic parts look very nice, but just to stay on the safe side I'll print a set of spares...
Had to kill the print.
At the moment the biggest problem I have is with the spools.
The spool holder is useless, and the filament is extremely rigid, so it tends to unwind, and then when the machine starts feeding it makes invariably a knot on the spool.
At this point I either have layer skipping, the spool running around, or falling over the printer.
So first in list is a spool holder for now. I keep on printing the spare parts, only as long as I can assist the printer from time to time, checking the filament feeding.
The prints are getting better. At first I had problems printing too fast.
Massimo
I started with this object:
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:7001
and adapted the bearing to my setup. A printable, single file bearing is extremely intriguing..
I printed them in ABS and in PLA 90 from Orbi-tech. Problem is orbi PLA is different wrt BitsfromBytes's PLA, so I had not a working profile for such a detailed part.
I was able to print the bearing using Orbi's PLA, simply setting it as ABS, and manually changing the temperature profile.
The parts in the picture are roughly cleaned, so the surface finish if extremly uneven, but the bearing works perfectly, both ABS and PLA versions.
The PLA from BitsfromBytes is much nicer, but this one is sturdier, even with far from perfect settings.
In the picture there is also a side by side comparison of two PLA prints, one working, withe the skinnier ABS settings, and another fatter but not working with the default setting.
Mounted on the spool the whiter bearing it the ABS one.
Massimo