New Printerina 2.0

After the success of Printerina I decided to use it to build a new printer completelly designed on my own starting from scratch. Printerina itself has some components I copied from the internet but, now that I have enough experience, I can build my own 3d Printer.

I have also in my mind the idea to build something really different with certain unique characteristics and, why not, able to be sold because of these unique enanchements. Now that I have the possibility I will dedicate this page to describe step by step the execution part of my project. It will be useful for most of you to understand how an idea like this can be realised and finalised. Hope you will enjoy reading this page

September 2017

The main idea was to build something small and portable. The new printerina printer will be composed by two main components. The portable chassis and a portable box containing all electric components. In August I started drawing some components. The following one is the first I designed during one of my trips

Originally it was the component I relised to be positioned at the bottom of the printer (the base triangle). Then I decided to use it at the top of the printer togheter with stepper motors. Motors at the top could allow a better gravity center allocation and this could reduce (or armonise) vibration during prints. To build the delta triangle the idea is to not use alluminium bars but a simple 8mm rod. This has two main advantages. The first one is the cost, the second advantage is that it gives the printer some more weight so a more stable base for the printer. To make this printer chipper than possible and to build an easy structure I need to build more components than possible using plastic (especially PLA) For this reason I decided to create a plastic track and to use a simple alluminium profile as rail. The track will be composed by two identical components (because of the dimension) linked togheter.
As you can see from the picture I draw two lateral rail and one big rail in front of the track. This is because the idea of carriage in my mind was with two wheel installed laterally and 2 big wheel in front of the carriage.

One of the issues encountered building a rail made of plastic is that it could be fragile if the fill rate is not adequate and if there is no any reinforce. The alluminium profile I used is also very useful to make the structure stronger.

October 2017

To verify the correctness of any link I decided to print and to build completelly only one vertex of the triangle and link all components togheter. The top module of the triangle was connected to the rail using a simple 8mm screw.

And with a smaller screw (cutting the head) I linked two rails togheter to reach an height for the printer of about 40 CM.
40 cm is the dimension I would like to use to build this 3d printer. An height bigger than 40 CM will make printerina V2 not so portable like I would like it to be.
Fortunatelly the first version of the original printerina printer is very high so it was easy for me to build a rail of 20CM
As evidenced before, I used an alluminium profile installed in the middle of the plastic track. This is useful to make printerina stronger, to link better the two plastic rails and to not increment too much the weight of the whole structure. Be only carefull to use always right measure as during the joint of the two structure you could damage plastic components. If you prefere you can add also some reinforce in the track I built in front of the rail.

8th of October 2017

I tried to buid autonomously the carriage. Print results are strongly dependent on carriage stability, this important concept makes such component the most important one for a 3d Printer. Let me anticipate that the big issue building such similar components is not to draw and print the carriage, but to underdstand how to connect wheels, and how to make it more stable than possible. Stable means that it shoud absolutelly not move in any not allowed direction and should move up and down with no interruption or vibrations during the path.

The stability of the carriage is the reason why I did many try building wheels in order to decide if to buy or to build such similar component.

In the next pictures you will see some wheels I built experimenting and searching for an optimal solution.

The result obtained connecting these wheels to the carriage was good from a projectual point of view but not good from a pratical perspective.

The original carriage I built is a 2+2 wheels model mountend on the lateral track and in front of the carriage. The wheels used to allign the track to the carriage are professional wheels bought via internet. I didn't find the same (commercial) format for the two frontal wheels (because too large). For this reason I was forced to print them. Unfortunatelly after some tests I realised it has no sense to print a wheel for professional usage with a standard 3D printer because you need something more elastic and it is impossible to make a wheel enough elastic as requested in this case. For this reason I decided to draw a new model of carriage, adopting 3 wheels, all commercially bought from the internet. With this approach I obtained great results:

Using elastic tiers I am now also able to balance all small imperfections on tracks produced during the print. The 3 wheels approach is also good because it saves the cost of 1 wheel incrementing the stability and adherence with the track.

Now it is the turn of the motor mount. I decided to put motors at the top of printerina. I am curious to verify the stability of such similar model. Considering more weight at the the top of the printer, we need to be sure that vibrations are well managed at the bottom by the printer foots. For this reason I will need to pay much more attention building the printer foots once the printer will be ready.
For now let's build the motor mounts. Based on my previous experience I decided to leave open more than possible the space for screws and all motor sides. This is needed to leave circulation for air flow.