In this episode I'm going to show you this.
Oh.
Well there you go, guess you can go now.
Unless you want to see it working.
You trust me right?
So, last time on "moron builds a voron" I think I left you with most of the parts printed
after explaining how I was printing them.
This episode is going to be some of me talking about building the printer and some of me
talking about the printer.
I am essentially finished as you can see, I wasn't sure how many episodes this would
be.
Also the channel name is being changed to Last in tech because the V0.2 is actually
out now, this was announced last week.
I watched it so you don't have to, the long and short is the main changes are that the
lid is now square.
And some other stuff.
But the lid is square.
I can't actually remember the other stuff.
I think there's a bottom cover so you can't poke things into the power pins.
I mean, that's useful for sure.
As you can see I haven't printed out the lid yet, it's called the tophat, I mean maybe
by the time I film the footage for this I might have, but probably not as I'm moving
on, I will probably do it when the weather is a bit warmer or something, it's not necessary
unless you're printing ABS or ASA or nylon and so on, and I'm not, because the only reason
I'd do that is if I'm printing another voron and I'm not chain building vorons.
So I guess first I'll cover the build.
This isn't a build video because nobody wants to see a build video of a printer thats just
been obsoleted last week.
I might in fact say that with few exceptions you don't need to see a build video, and those
few exceptions includes getting your head around the *design language* that the voron
manual uses.
By that I mean you need to watch a bit of modbot's build I'll link below.
But by that I also mean you need to understand what the manual is telling you, because it's
not always explicit.
If you go in cold straight from ikea assembly instructions you're going to make some mistakes.
The main points I guess, that I can give you to help you not make mistakes are as follows:
When it says preload nuts, you slot these nuts into the frame in the slot.
In my kit they're just plain old nuts, youre might be square.
They're M3 nuts.
Every single preloaded nut is the same, just keep on using the same M3 nuts.
On the topic of those preloaded nuts you can if you wish print out thingies that you can
use to stop the nuts sliding about.
I didn't, and I think it made it harder to get the nuts to sit in position.
Now the manual doesn't mention the existence of them, except it does because if you build
a 0.2, it now does, apparently.
I am on the fence about these because while they do help the nuts stay where they are,
they also stop them moving.
And I think it's personal opinion whether that's a good thing or not, by the end of
the build I was just about used to sliding them up and down like a weird puzzle cube.
And also on the topic of nuts still...about the manual, it never draws screw threads or
nuts at all, again something to get used to, once you understand what it means it's fine,
basically you're always screwing into an M3 nut unless otherwise specified.
Moving on from nuts, these extrusions, you need to identify them by their hole placements
but there's one gotcha and that is that some are tapped in the ends and others are not.
If you don't identify this you might end up accidentally using the tapped ones because
the last ones you need for the frame are non tapped, and swapping them out would proabably
set you back at least a couple of hours.
What else, oh, some things aren't super critical while others are, it's not that critical where
for example the linear rails sit, down to the millimeter, and it's not even that critical
that they are straight which is weird given there's a guide piece for that, but it is
critical that they're trammed, ie parallel to each other, so the relevant axis doesn't
lock up.
I wouldn't stress too much over this, it's one of the easier things to do, to loosen
all the screws and tram the bed or rails later.
Heat inserts are pretty easy it turns out, I used this £5 usb soldering iron which is
better than you might expect actually, the pointy tip just kind of sits in there and
you can push them in, I recommend a lower temperature so you're releasing less smoke,
do not get this smoke in your eye, it really hurts.
So what do I think of the voron build process?
I think for the zero at least, for me, it's a bit tedious.
I wouldn't overanalyze this - I find everything that takes more than an hour tedious.
Especially editing videos.
Editing videos is torture.
I enjoyed some parts, but a lot of it, and you'll get this too if you decide to build
one, a lot of it you look at the manual, and you see that you have to line up another four
nuts into an exact location and try to screw into them without being able to see them.
And it does take a long long time and a lot of preloading nuts to get past this stage.
I know I'll get pushback for saying this because the final design is very clever, but the assembly
is...annoying in places.
This is not to put you off, but if you have any dexterity issues at all, you're going
to find this difficult.
In terms of outright difficulty though as in, how hard it is to actually understand
and fit the parts together, it's really not.
There's gotchas, like this one here where I put the motor on with the socket pointing
like this because it looked like it ought to go that way, but then when it came to wiring
the wire was too short to reach, but if you were wiring and crimping yourself that would
be a non issue, but yeah there are several traps you can get into - many of them pointed
out in the manual.
One of the key worries I had going into this was that my parts wouldn't fit - again, this
is not mentioned in the manual but apparently there's a calibration piece you should print
first.
I still don't know where that is or what it looks like but broadly speaking my parts did
fit.
With the exception of one piece, the cowling for the hot end, and I am pretty sure that's
because my fans were oversized slightly, fysetc has a repository with a couple of parts updated
so if you build from that kit then be sure to print those parts but the cowling was still
too small and I had to increase it by I think just 1%.
And I'm going to say it again so that I can be called incompetent again, if you saw part
one, every single piece printed was made on the sovol SV06 in the garage at stupidly cold
temperatures, and with the exception of this tiny hole here where the x stop sensor mounts
not one part split or failed.
At all.
The SV06 proved itself to be probably the cheapest way to print a voron without using
someone else's printer to do it, and that's impressive for a stock budget printer.
I heard it did really well in reviews too.
You know, like my review, where I called this.
Anyway once assembled you have to do the electronics which was probably the most enjoyable part
for me, I think you really see the printer come together at this point.
The only Pi I could get my hands on at the time was one already in an aluminium heatsink
case, but I just stuck it in there, it's mounted with this VHB tape which no kidding means
very high bond, imaginative naming there, but I think it helped to have it in this case
because it's neater for wiring over.
After that there's a bit of a sort of thing where you have a potentially working printer
that powers up but what do you do?
Probably go to sleep and come back to it next day if we're honest but the urge is to just
hurtle straight into it.
The setup of klipper is quite involved though so and I don't want to go into it any more
than I have to but if you're lucky your board like mine will already have a version of klipper
on it, making it easier to at least test and worry about later, the SD card does also come
with mainsailos on it I think, but I reflashed that as I don't have a wired network anywhere
convenient, but I think it took maybe an hour all told to get that part working and be able
to level the bed and absolutely not print a benchy.
Surprisingly, considering at least three people called me useless and incompetent after the
last episode, you guys are charming, the voron zero actually worked first time without any
tuning needed.
Sort of.
We'll get to that.
But it actually printed a surprisingly neat cube.
But that's just the beginning of the config and if you look at the page here on secondary
tuning theres stuff you still need to do.
Belt tension is a funny one because there's this sort of idea maintained that the belts
should be somehow insanely tight, but the recommended starting tension is, I have no
idea what an LB is, but I asked google and it said 0.9kg, which is actually lower than
I recommended you run your bed slinger's belts at, I realise this is stated as a starting
point, but yeah, it sure looks like the same old rules apply as to belt tension, who knew.
The one point I wanted to get back to was the issues I had with some layer shifts and
really odd noises, like, banging noises, I thought "oh no, incompetence strikes again",
but no, actually this was ...unbelievably, from having stealthchop enabled.
I'm sure a smart person will correct me but my understanding is that stealthchop reduces
the available torque and the nema14 motors are sort of specced to under an amp and you
don't want to over drive them because it would literally melt the part they're attached to
because even ABS will bend at pretty low temperatures like 70C or so, the motors would be happy
to 120C, so you're running them pretty low torque as is.
Long story short, turn off all of that stealthchop nonsense, the printer will be slightly less
quiet but honestly no because it literally isn't banging any more.
So you probably want to see how fast I dared to run it at?
I think this is probably as far as I am willing to go.
Not bad, right?
It's not as fast as the V400 but it's probably currently my 2nd fastest printer, so yeah,
a reasonable result.
So lets summarize then.
Firstly, was the kit any good?
Yes, it was fine.
You can tell it's a cheaper kit than the LDO one everyone favours, but at
the same time the printer is working fine and I have no issues.
If you sum up what it would cost you, the kit is around *330 dollars, add 60 for filament,
ignore time because that's free right?
And so maybe for under 400 dollars assuming you have tools already like drills and needle
files, yeah that's not bad at all for what you get.
And
on that note, I think I'm
ready to move on.
Next up I think is a review of the nesting set of three neptunes, we've got a printer
so big it can hold the zero on its build plate, and then we've got one even bigger than that.
So, yeah, subscribe.
I will catch you next time!