It's a few good printers.
This is my mods for a Voron Legacy.
Oh, not much.
It seems silly to come up with a good implementation and not use it simply because you want to 'harken back' to the bad ol' days.
I have always disliked designs that tension the belts by moving the motor - and needing to loosen/tighten 2 or more screws, relying on the motor to slide smoothly against a printed surface, and/or needing to reach hard-to-reach places to adjust. So I adapted the tension idlers from the V2.4, and the motor mounts as well.
I elected to use some OpenBuilds 2020 extrusion I had, so it probably wasn't perfect, and the slots were different...but the difference highlighted a design flaw in the original Legacy: The Y rods get supported by two different datums at each end.
In the back, there is a single part that is located by the 2020 slot, and the rod spacing is fixed, and as accurate and repeatable as the printer used to print that part.
In the front, the original idlers were a sandwich on the top and bottom of the 2020, and used pockets to hold the rods. Any variation the in the 2020 would mean that those rods could be not parallel.
So, I simply made a new Y rod support (x4), into which I also made a small cut so that when turned the right direction, would allow the full travel of the gantry.
This also means that I could remove the idler tensioners, if need be, without unmounting the gantry.
I found the original Legazy Z to be very...problematic.
The rods were spaced far apart, which seemed to make rocking and binding of the whole thing to be too easy.
On top of rocking, it needed manual adjusting of the buildplate with screws. Which were on a wobbly Z axis. That you had to touch.
This isn't 'harkening back', this is regressing.
So I adapted something like the Jubilee. I didn't know about the Voron Trident at the time, so that's what I was looking off of.
I didn't like the Jubilee's use of springs to hold down the kinematic table, because I could easily see myself trying to lift a magnetic build plate off and stretching the springs. The springs Jubilee used were also tiny fiddly little bits. So I came up with a solution to use magnets as effectively as possible, given what I had and could easily model. The result is something that uses cheap magnets, in something like a Halbach array. The downside is that while I do have alot more magnetic 'stick' than otherwise, the magnets I used are cheap, and so it's not enough to keep the table in place when I invert the printer or turn it on it's side :)
I wanted to try making a Tap upgrade for a printer.
I'd already tried doing the KlickyNG probe, and got it working with the 'Z Calibration' hardware and Klipper module, in order to hopefully work with any build plate I might want.
I can't say I liked it. Too much to configure, and too much that could go wrong. Naturally, when I saw the Voron Tap, I realized I wanted something that simple - just touch the damn nozzle to the surface. Simple, right?
Right?
Because the Igor is using 8mm rods, it's not exactly stiff. Mass is a problem (always is on all printers), and adding more wasn't an option. I also didn't want to have to source more special parts for my Igor.
I also have been wanting to try compliant mechanisms ('flexures') for a while.
Thus is born an X carriage with a flexure and a UnKlicky-esque probe switch.
Does it work? As of 20230429, I have successfully tested it for homing and probing.
Partly because I was working on this through a couple upversions of FreeCAD, partly because I was learning more advanced CAD as I went along, and partly because if there is one negative thing I might accuse the Voron designers of, it's CAD-wanking.
Sure, their designs work well, and they have a nice aesthetic, but when working from the STEP models, some things I had to just take dimesions and start over, because of curved surfaces and such didn't let me easily mod things, or the imported STEP would develop problems in FreeCAD when I tried to alter them.
- My CAD files are a mess. I import other stuff, and the resulting file is HUGE.
- I use the FreeCAD-realthunder snap.
- If you open them in another FreeCAD version, they will likely break, or need a 'recompute now', at which time they will break.
- STEP files are stable
Some people joking online saying the Legacy should have been named 'Frankenstein' because they built it out of leftover parts. This is wrong, because Frankenstein was the name of the doctor, not his creation.
I think it would be far more appropriate to adopt the name of a character from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series:
- the approach to self-improvement
- the extreme recycling/upcycling
- the spirit of Reprap in which one Igor can make many more
- the way it is always just behind me when I need it
Alternative names I considered:
- That Thing In the Cellar
- Box O' Parts
- Reprap Centipede