Printing SUPER fast!

[Nifty]

Hey @The Hat , this is my kind of print speed!!

 

[Nifty]

Good for people like me that are SUPER impatient!

BTW, I just upped my nozzle from 0.6 to 0.8 and am playing around with how that speeds up my prints. Pretty interesting pros and cons.

 

[The Hat]

BTW, I just upped my nozzle from 0.6 to 0.8 and am playing around with how that speeds up my prints. Pretty interesting pros and cons.

I can sympathise with you on that, because my two recent purchases of 3Dprinter have 0.4 nozzles in them, and they will stay that way until I can get my backlog of printing done.

I mostly used 0.5 nozzles in my 2 older printers and that worked quite well but when I print anything with type in it, I was forced to use universe bold fonts because 0.5 nozzles are on the limited for quality type images.

I plan to switch my printers over to 0.5 when I get the chance because printing with the 0.4 nozzle is God awful slow especially when I’ve been use to 0.5 nozzles, I plan to move up to 0.6 in one of them just to see how fast it prints compared to the smaller nozzle sizes.

When it boils down to it 3D printing with larger nozzles are not all that different to inkjet printing, except you don’t have the pixel peepers, it’s like using a lower DPI on your larger prints.

When seen in the hand the 0.5 prints look pretty good but 0.4 nozzles do look better, and for most things I print I’ve never been put off by the visible printed lines that you get from a 3D print, nor has anyone else, the printed objects are still all magic to hold..

I print at 50 mm/s and that’s fast enough for me, the other added bonus is most if not all the things I print turn out great, except for the odd one that falls of the hotbed and turns into a ball of wool.. It always seems to happen when you’re in a hurry..

This maybe not be inkjet printing but patience is still a virtue that can save you a lot of time, an inkjet prints can take 15 minutes but my 3D prints can take 3 days.. Especially with 0.4 nozzles..

 

[Redbrickman]

About 150mm/sec is achievable with a corexy but after that the quality and life expectancy of the bearings and other parts are greatly shortened

Here is a Voron going at 300mm/sec and printing a full print not just thin wall, but I think it wil eventiually fall apart with the stresses of the acceleration etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6uNQ83_gok

 

[Steve J]

Nope. What will happen is that the belts will snap, or at a minium will stretch and/or the stepper motors will burn out. You can't throw that extruder carriage around like that have not have something happen. The old plotters I designed used really heavy servo motors (Slo-Syns) and very flexible steel cables to drive the pen, and we could get speeds around 300mm/sec. The other problem you will have is what we called "ink starvation". That is, to maintain that speed, you have to feed the extruder really fast to deliver the filament fast enough to lay down filament properly. Same problem with ink on a pen plotter. Chances are, the extruder motor is going to take it really hard and either strip the gears or burn out the motor. 1.75mm filament might work, but 3mm is better.

To do a really fast 3D printer (the commercial ones are built like this), you need to get away from the RepRap design (small steppers, toothed belts, etc.) and go with real motion control components. You also need a mechanical engineer on staff to identify these problems, especially if you go into production with this.

I've seen the big Stratasys machines, and they are built correctly. Of course, they are in the $100K+ price range.

I just got my Prusa I3MK3S kit, and after some fiddling, it's together and works fairly well. The filament runout sensor doesn't work, but I hesitate to pull the extruder apart to fix it. Apparently, it is a major trouble spot. Joe Prusa needs some mechanical engineers on his staff who know about tolerances of 3D printed parts. I am not impressed by this machine, but it works and I am using it. It still gives me better results than my old Flashforge Creator clone (Monoprice Maker) that is highly modified. I do like the idea of the PEI surface on a flexible metal plate. I got tired of having to use blue tape to print and scraping the prints off the surface..

One of these days, I am going to build a 600 x 600 IDEX 3D printer the right way, not the reprap way. I need to come up with a good extruder design: lightweight and powerful. You want to keep the extruder light so it doesn't have too much mass so you can drive it fast.

Right now, I am designing and building a case for a Pi3 (with custom hat) with Octoprint and an enclosure for the printer. The Octoprint will control lighting and the whole thing will run off it's own 12V power supply. I have most of the components already, and will probably make the enclosure out of wood, with a clear polycarbonate door.

Steve