So this arrived. Cool huh. I guess it's voron time.
No not this one, this one. Let's go
So the first question is why am I doing this why is Lost in Tech guy building a voron. I
suppose the answer is because FYSETC asked me if I wanted to try a voron zero kit and
I would have been frankly insane to say no, so here's the kit in question. Actually the
first question is probably what on earth is a 𓅂, because I realize I'm assuming everyone knows
because so many people who are on our Discord and just generally the people I talked to day
to day they know because these are people who are seriously interested in 3D printing.
If you're new to 3D printing then a voron is a rather no compromises self-built printer
that originally you would have had to source all the parts from a bill of materials, not a kit,
but thankfully a few manufacturers have provided kits which are basically just a bill of materials
in a box, that kind of brings it down to sort of almost like building a prusa I think. Most sane
people would recommend doing it this way because unless you're really good at sourcing parts or
you enjoy going through spreadsheets of part numbers then this is easier this is a lot easier.
The premise of the 𓅂 zero is, well this paragraph on their front page here: it's highly regarded by
voron owners as one of the best printers you can get and I'm sure you absolutely wouldn't think
otherwise having spent tens of hours building one and spent the money on one, but seriously we'll
see won't we because I plan to poke around at this thing rather than just build it, and I want
to show you along the way how I'm building it, and why it's clever and well designed.
This is the first episode and - don't start I know I've got a bit of a history with regards to first
episodes - um this part is me showing you what is in the kit and how I'm going about the project and
some gratuitous Lack table footage maybe, but it's all a bit quick and dirty because mainly... unlike
a lot of the stuff I do on this channel, this one is me documenting some actual hard work that I'm
doing. So I'm filming it as and when it happens rather than staging it afterwards as I might do
in a review: there's a lot of that goes on believe it or not when you when you normally edit you go
back and you say well I haven't got a good shot of this so you have to take things apart and
do it again so in this case I'm not doing that. Stuff will be missing. I will have lost footage,
no doubt things will be out of focus, things will be portrait and landscape when they should
be landscape and portrait - we'll just have to see what happens we'll we'll play it by ear.
And it's ongoing as I read this script I'm still I'm still doing it.
So we have all manner of parts that I'll annotate on screen during the editing
because uh as I said I'm reading the script before I re-watch and
that throws off my usual video process there's just no way of dealing with this level of
unboxing, enough excuses let's just put some music on and I'll jump in awkwardly during the
edit if I have anything to say, with a different voice I suppose because that's how that works
the kit you see here is without printed Parts which means you have to print the parts -obviously
- so what parts are we talking about you're not printing hardware, you're printing the bits that
hold the hardware together... arguably. I mean it's an interesting way of thinking about it.
The list of parts you have to print for voron zero is on GitHub and I will link
it below or I'll forget in which case you can access it easily from the voron website which
I will link below or also forget :) The parts list can look foreboding, and it sort of is,
there are... (counting in a futile manner) a lot of parts to print - I guess it'd be like
about a hundred to be honest - at the time of editing I'm not even finished printing the parts.
Here is my increasing pile of parts. I am getting there but more on that later.
Voron that later. Sigh.
[ Oh hey subtitle readers. Did you know Voron means Raven? Shh! ]
I found the best way to tackle printing them was actually to move the parts themselves into
subfolders for build plates, you can do it however you want, you just have to get the parts printed,
but I think organization is absolutely necessary rather than just ploughing in and starting doing
it in terms of print settings it's in the manual on the first page: just use the settings they give
you. In terms of material, again it's on the first page of the manual. You can't use pla,
you shouldn't use petg, I mean you might get away with it but people have had bad experience,
including Stefan from CNC kitchen who tried to do his out of petg I think, and had to go
back and do it again. I think it was petg. But anyway unfortunately this is the deal
breaker for some of us and it was a deal breaker for me until very recently, the voron parts need
to be printed in a material that has a low creep and high glass point, and that means a material
that's not good to print in the house, or at least not good to print around where you're breathing.
I chose to use ABS but a lot of people choose ASA they're kind of equivalent,
both are horrendously bad for your health - you can argue all day long about how
safe these materials are, we've had these arguments on social media the argument is
fairly dumb to be honest it's about the same level of dumb argument as arguing
that smoking isn't harmful because you've been doing it all your life and you're fine.
Do not print ABS or ASA in the same room as your breathing air is kept in it's quite simple.
For me that did present a problem but the solution was to use the garage.
Now for people who share the same hemisphere as me it's currently winter,
if your garage is anything like mine that means it's currently cold in your garage.
Solution? Enclosure. You kind of need an enclosure any way to print ABS so
not a huge difference there but the quickest cheapest and probably least responsible way
to make an enclosure is with an Ikea Lack This is the cheapy table that Ikea sells.
I decided I wanted everything inside the enclosure including the spool of filament
which turned out to be a great choice as you'll see in a moment, but to achieve that
I had to buy three lacks and here's an awful drawing of the layout to how I made that work.
Also I messed up my elbow last time I assembled a lack ...we're kind of wandering off topic here
aren't we, but the idea of putting legs on three lacks was not sitting well with me
they they really do mess up your arm so I made this. You can find this on printables in case
I also forget to link it below I do have a habit of forgetting to link things this thing if I can
blow my own trumpet from moment which I'm going to no one could stop me this thing is amazing
Ikea if you're listening you need to put one of these in every package with a table inside
it even if it increases the cost by 12 pounds just do it seriously also I had to print these
things out to hold the Legends together sorry leg ends uh these work fine but if you're planning on
making an enclosure like this print these at 104% because they don't fit at standard size.
I surrounded the enclosure with this foam that I keep getting free with printers
because... it's free, you can pretty much use anything, it turns out that you don't
really need the insulating capabilities or properties, you just need draft mitigation.
The printer I chose to print these parts with is the sovol sv06, which I'm sure if you visited this
channel before you will be aware of that printer, but it is all metal and it has a maximum print
temp of 300 degrees C and a maximum bed temp of 100 degrees C and with the Pei plate and it's
about the right size to fit inside the Lack and it has less parts to get angry about being out in
the cold for, so I chose that one for printing the parts and it was ostensibly (hahaha posh word) the
right choice because it has done an amazing job, but we'll talk at the end about that.
Because we're printing abs and I got these two reels of Abs from esun which a lot of
people have used the esun ABS plus I didn't want to rock the boat so I just bought it
I decided to also use glue stick on the PE I bed and that actually turned out to be a decent choice
because it did work really well now being in the garage in the cold you're probably wondering how
that that whole thing went, and I did take quite a bit of data actually the outside temperature for
almost all of the prints so far has been frankly horrible, with ice and temperatures below zero.
We're having what they call in the UK, I mean this is like the weakest name for a weather
um phenomenon ever we're having a "cold snap". The garage itself had been around zero to
five degrees Celsius - that does sound like an absolute nightmare for ABS and I'm sure it is,
the sv06 hilariously refused to believe the thermistor on the bed and it was regularly
telling me there must be a mistake and it would refuse to operate. I couldn't
possibly be stupid enough to try and print it at that temperature so it must be a mistake it
must be an error in the thermistor, but no I really am trying to print at zero degrees C .
With the bed set to 100 degrees C and a print temperature of 250 to 260 for the ABS the
inside ambient air was hanging around barely 20 degrees C so basically it was a room temperature
enclosure but you know what it worked fine I think there's a lesson to be learned here and
that's to be selective about established knowledge you can see that my prints are perfectly fine as
a result of this technique (if you can call it a technique) and I think that the reason why it's
perfectly fine when it shouldn't be at that kind of conditions is because the enclosure is stopping
any drafts even though it's not exactly airtight but it's stopping stopping gusts of wind from
cooling the part, and it can't maintain a high temperature but it still works fine so obviously
that's not a priority it's more about the drafts. I did initially suffer some of the classic
shrinkage-based cracking that you see a lot but a bit of research and the internet told
me to turn the part cooling fan down to five percent and that absolutely solved the layer
shrinkage issues totally it will have increased the stringing a little bit but honestly it's fine.
Look at these, you would struggle to convince someone that this was done in
a freezing garage with the 250 off-the-shelf printer and I find that quite interesting.
So..what next? Hopefully in part two I will be finishing up printing, and discussing
any issues I may or may not have had during the printing make sure you're subscribed if
you want to catch the next episode. As usual comment if you have any advice or tips on what
not to do so I can do exactly that and I will catch you in part two thank you for watching.