good morning youtube working on the 3d printer today it's the last few days i've been trying
to print some of my battery holders and one of the problems i ran into i printed one of these
it worked just perfect after that i tried printing some more so i would get up here between an eight
and a quarter inch the extruder would start going over and it was no longer sticking to the part
and then it would fail and i tried changing all sorts of settings after trying all that
i finally decided it was probably this extruder cooling fan and if you listen here
it's pretty noisy this this fan's always been a little bit noisy when it first starts up but it
always works so i never bothered replacing it but there's two screws there's one at the top
corner and then one at the lower right corner that you have to get out and it was so hard to get to
i just kind of kept putting it off but i finally ordered three extra fans from solid state printers
to have some spares this one is still working now i normally print abs so i'm not using the
part cooling fan but with these battery holders i've got a bunch of pla filament so i'm using that
instead and with pla you need the parts cooling fan that was working but this was not and this
whole hot end was getting very hot i think the fan turns on at 50 celsius yeah yeah there we
go i couldn't even hear it i wasn't feeling any air blowing out of the front the funny thing is
the fan was spinning you could see that the blades were moving but it just wasn't fast enough to move
any air so i think we're good to go now yeah i've been fighting this for a couple of days thinking
that i messed something up with my slicer so now i've got to go back and undo all the settings that
i was trying but yeah i guess that fan must have died a couple of days ago one part printed just
perfect and then the next one didn't print at all but let me show you one other fix that i've done
here i guess this is called the x cable because it's the x-axis it's a flat flex cable here
i've had problems with the cable flexing a lot during printing and i had one of these
fail so i had some custom cables made i got the cables a little bit longer so there was a little
more room for the cable to flex over here so it doesn't bend quite as tight there we're going
let's see if we can move out here we'll go over over up up
so even if i go all the way over
yeah i think the little bit longer cable gives it a little larger radius on the curve there
and you can see the other thing i've done because that cable normally just came out
of the connector there and it was supported over here and all the weight of the cable
was hanging there and actually i think the problem is it puts stress on this connector here
and it was actually the contacts on the flat flex cable seemed to get chewed up and that's where it
seemed to be the problem because you could unplug this and plug it back in and it would
work for a while and then you'd unplug it press it back in and i think it was just stress on this
connector because all that weight of the cable was being supported the cable was
twisting this way okay so to try to support this cable a little bit i made this cable support
there and i found there's a gap between this white circuit board that the motor mounts to
and then there's another circuit board on the back side that all the cables plug into you
can see there's the motor cable the x cable and then there's the the y cable back there
and there's about an eighth of an inch gap roughly so yeah what i did was i measured that out
and i cut a little cardboard template here so overall this piece is about eight inches long
and vertical spacing between these two sets of holes is about two and a sixteenth of an
inch and then horizontally here between those two holes on the bottom or the two on the top is about
1.5 inches and the standoffs are roughly quarter inch maybe six millimeter so i made up a cardstock
template here i think this was probably my second version and what i found is i needed to come
up about a half inch higher than this line and you can see there i came up right about the top of the
circuit board with the bottom of the support and then i went up an inch above the top the reason i
went up that high is you've got the stepper motor there in back and then you've got the fan cables
and the stepper motor cables are all down here so i wanted to keep the cable support above the level
of the stepper motor so that there's clearance so it can move back and forth for this i was going to
3d print a part i found i had a piece of generic perf board so it's a circuit board material
and i had a piece eight inches wide and that turned out to be absolutely ideal so i just used
my template and laid it down on the circuit board material cut it out and then i put the copper side
of the circuit board towards the back and then i soldered two wires on there to support the cable
i just put the copper wire on and then bent them so the two wires roughly bend at the same level
as the cable comes out of the connector there as you can see now it supports it all the way across
and keeps the cable up off of the bed so if your part your printing is up here it
keeps the cable free you fit it in like this and then you catch that upper stand off with this hole
and then you you have to trim it really carefully to fit over the bottom stand off and then that's
what locks it in place so it's it's just held in there by gravity so i can't see if there's any
bare circuit board traces on the on the back side circuit board but what i did was i just wrapped my
pcb material in electrical tape that had two functions that turned out to be really good
one is it insulates that copper side so there's no potential short circuit and then i was also able
to build up the thickness by putting a little tape on this side so that it really jams in there tight
when the printer is vibrating and doing a lot of fast movements i don't want that piece falling
out of there yeah that's been working really well the only thing i have to watch for is when i feed
in new filament over the top i generally have to reach into the back and pull the filament
out of my filament guide and every once in a while i'll end up knocking the ribbon cable out of that
loop back there so i just have a hook bent on the end of the wire when i change the filament check
that the ribbon cable is still up in there it's not firmly secured it just sits there
because i don't want to put any stress on that cable the length worked out perfect like i said
it was an eight inch wide perf board two inches gets used up in behind the stepper motor and then
that brings the edge of this out to six inches and since the build plate is 12 inches wide that gives
support out to halfway out to six inches and then you've got six inches of cable here to move around
so when you come all the way here there's still a loop of cable there it's not pulled tight
and you can see everything's just nice and loose
but it's supported yeah if you have one of these type a machines series one or series
one pro printers i think this will really help with the uh x cable wear the the nice thing is
this moves with the y axis so it comes back and forth it's never going to be in the way
of anything moving side to side because it moves with the the print head on the overhead beam there
so it took me quite a while to figure out exactly how to support that and i've been running this now
for probably a month or two and no problems with it yet so i think that's a really good upgrade
i'm surprised they didn't do something like that from the factory because there was a lot of
stress on that cable just hanging there and it was wearing out the connector right on this end
i think the the cable itself was fine it was just this uh male connector that plugs into
the circuit board was getting chewed up the old plating was getting worn off the contacts and it
was just the stress right at that connector from all the moving side to side and the vibrations and
this is the ticket to these printers keeps your cable out of the way and everything works really
nice so i got to get back to printing here i've got to take my model here and
undo all the changes i've been making and get a fresh model and then try to reprint this so yeah
i'll try to come back and give you an update on how the print work there and we can check it out
you