Building an Epic DIY 3D Printer: Voron 2.4 with Mods!

hey what's up guys it's dr d flo and i'm back with arguably the coolest diy 3d printer that you can build today boron 2. [Music] dr d flow this printer backs up its futuristic looks with sophisticated features that yield some very stunning but also very quick prints perhaps the most notable feature is that each corner each z-axis is independently driven allowing the printer to untwist itself when it is first booted up manual bed leveling is a thing of the past with this printer i'm going to get into all the features but let me quickly explain the goal of this video because walking through building this printer piece by piece will take about 10 or so hours and this content already exists on youtube instead this is going to be more of a montage build where i quickly cover the assembly of the printer but take a deeper dive into new innovations and topics that are not in my how to build a 3d printer video but are present on this printer this will include discussions on linear guideways core xy kinematics and 3d printer enclosures i will also cover some of the obstacles with building a printer like this and some modifications that i've deemed as must-haves for my second build but before we get to all that what even is a voron is it a 3d printer or is it a company as an outside observer i see it as more of a design philosophy a push to make a premium diy printer where all the files and build info are centralized you don't have to scavenge for files across multiple websites to create a functional printer the voron project was created by tinkerer max zolin and it started off as just an extruder design which has since grown into five separate printers the naming scheme of these printers is a little bit confusing because voron zero voron one and voron two would sound like iterations of the same printer with voron 2 being the latest and greatest but these are all separate designs voron 2 the printer that we are building today has by far the most features but in turn is the most complicated to build if you are new to 3d printer building then i would suggest starting off with the voron switch wire its design is familiar to those who have experience with prusa or creality printers but it will also warm you up to running timing belt loops all the voron printers use a mix between off-the-shelf hardware and 3d printed components getting my hands on all the non-printed parts from voron 2 was by far the biggest headache of the whole build i had just enough components at my house from past projects that did not make sense for me to purchase a kit from a third party also i had heard stories on reddit about poor quality motors and dinged up linear rails arriving in these kits but if i had to do it all over again i would probably risk it for the biscuit and purchase a kit because if you don't follow the sourcing guide to a t you're going to have some problems just a quick example here this is a 3d printed part with a cable tie on it now the spacing of this cable tie is so small that it doesn't work with any of my zip ties i have at home you have to specifically buy the zip tie prescribed on the bill of materials or it's not going to fit now there are other instances like this where the printer favors looks over flexibility and we'll cover that by the way there are a couple different size boron 2s that you can build 250 300 or 350. i chose the 300 by 300 millimeter build area version the larger the build area the harder it will be to tram the printer because small misalignments will multiply over longer distances also as the printer heats up it will experience greater thermal expansion which is not good so bigger is not always better with 3d printing definitely consider what you're going to be printing before deciding on a more on size while you're waiting for your hardware and electronics to arrive you can start printing the 200 odd parts required to fully construct this printer if you follow the typical duotone boron color scheme then you will need about 1.5 kilogram of a base color and a 0.5 kilogram of an accent color for my first for on i went stealthy and kept everything black but for my next one i'm gonna go with the traditional black and red scheme in case you were wondering voron means raven in russian and ravens are black hence the name but back to the 3d printed components voron is an enclosed printer which means it will trap the heat of the bed creating a chamber that can reach upwards of 60c which is ideal when printing abs nylon polycarbonate and really any other filament that is not pla-based the heated chamber decreases the temperature gradient between the plastic that has been printed and is currently being printed reducing shrinkage residual stresses and part deformation so heated chambers are great for printing but they are difficult to incorporate in diy printers that use 3d printed parts because these parts must maintain their mechanical integrity when in this hot environment heat deflection temperature is the point at which a plastic becomes too weak to support a specified load for voron we need to print our part out of a plastic with at least a heat deflection of that 60c chamber temperature but some parts will be next to motors which obviously run hotter in a contained box so be on the safe side we need a heat deflection temperature north of adc which puts us in the abs realm whatever you do do not use pla or pet g for printing voron parts or your gantry will sag due to the temperature i went with mater hackers pro series of abs the pro designation means that this filament is tougher stronger and more heat resistant than traditional abs filament however these improved properties also make it a little trickier to print abs pro needs to be printed in an enclosure and neither my maker gear nor my little xydex have this feature fortunately with the help of mater hackers i now have access to the bcn 3d epsilon which is an absolutely ludicrous 3d printer with a 420 by 300 by 400 millimeter build volume i was able to print all the parts for boron in four build plates it probably could have been less but i had to switch colors as a side note abs wasn't just chosen for its heat deflection temperature it was also picked for its high tensile strength and chemical resistance oils and grease will be present around the linear rails which we'll talk about during the assembly this is why a material like polycarbonate would not be ideal for boron even though it has great thermal properties a lot of the required parts for voron are duplicates so in these instances i was able to print these components twice as fast with a duplication mode on the epsilon which uses both of the extruders to print two separate but identical parts if you're unable to print abs the voron project has a printed forward program where you can pay a small fee to get all the parts printed for you in addition to the printed forward program there's also a discord and facebook group reddit page everything you need to successfully build this printer hopefully this video will help as well okay with all the printed parts and required hardware in front of me i think you can now get a sense of the magnitude of this project there is a lot going on but fortunately not only is there a cad model for the printer but there's also a manual documentation like this is how you make an open source project accessible and popular hats off to the dev team for putting this much effort into a project without any compensation i use the manual as a roadmap to figure out the order for which i should tackle each assembly but i mostly relied on the cad model to figure out the location and orientation of the parts this model includes not only the belting but also the individual heat inserts really really thorough now that i'm done obsessing with the cad model the first step is to clear all this off and start working on the frame we basically need to construct a cube out of this aluminum extrusion now typically to get aluminum extrusion to connect at a right angle you use a right angle connector but the voron build and materials calls for this blind connection which i really like and is worth a deeper dive into so you take a m5 bolt and with one of these ends tapped you screw it in not all the way just enough that this other extrusion can slide over the head of that bolt and then because this extrusion has a hole in it i have access to that hex key of the bolt depending on where you purchase your aluminum extrusion from you may have to drill that hole yourself now while this method is super low profile and really only requires an extra bolt you do have to be careful that there's no burrs present on this inside extrusion because that can prevent it from mating at a right angle which would not be good so i always check with a square after the fact and i'll be able to adjust some of this spacing right here when i attach the other piece it's very important that you apply thread lock to almost every single bolt in this build this is going to be a very fast printer the faster you can print the more you're going to print and the more cycles are going to be on all the components which is going to give these bolts a greater opportunity to back out and because this printer is enclosed you want everything to be as permanent as possible because it can be a little bit difficult to get into some nooks and crannies and tighten everything down after you've run the printer for a while so best to put the effort up front [Music] are you tired of getting blue thread locker on your nice white shirts well i got the solution for you because the new dr d flow 3d printing t-shirt perfectly matches the color of threadlock link below if you want to support the channel and get some cool merch the other thing you need to be on the lookout for with these blind connections is that the extrusion's not twisted there are 3d printed a's that you can use to make sure everything's lined up but if that aids not perfectly square then you're going to have problems i like to just use a you know a typical engineered square that way i'm not compounding inaccuracies of another printer with this printer next we need to install two pieces of extrusion that will act as risers for the build plate i described the frame as a cube earlier i do want to point out that this thing is actually 20 millimeters taller in the z direction so you need to make sure that you have the orientation right when we go in to install those risers i will permanently install this build plate at a later step for now i'm just going to keep it down here and with the frame largely complete we can add on the linear guideways now this is a topic that i want to talk a little more about because i made the mistake of largely neglecting this component during my how to build a 3d printer video even two short years ago a 350 millimeter long rail like this one would have cost you sixty to a hundred dollars and even at that price the motion on the rail would feel crunchy to get a usable rail you'd have to take everything apart clean it and re-grease that cost and effort was not worth the benefit but today for about one-fourth of that price you can get the same rail and it's pretty usable out of the box what are the benefits of a linear rail compared to the extrusion carriage with plastic wheels found on an ender 3 or myx build well proper linear rails are superior in about every metric their low friction recirculating ball bearings allow for high speed operations and offers smoother motion also you don't have to check their alignment over time just a little bit of grease here and there and they will be operating at top performance i'm going to keep talking about linear rails but while i do that i'm going to go ahead and apply some of this ep2 mobile grease which is a must-have for linear rails these ones arrived bone dry which is not good so we're just going to put a small coating on the rail move the carriage back and forth and have those balls pick up that grease we don't want excess grease it's going to cause more friction more heat and the carriage could fail prematurely less is more but you just want a nice thin film of grease on the rail a lot of people like to tout that linear guideways are more precise than aluminum extrusion motion system like the v whales and yes i would agree with that up until you mount those guideways onto an aluminum extrusion the cross-sectional area of this mini guideway is so small that it will conform to whatever surface it's mounted to so any twist in the aluminum extrusion will be translated to the rail to combat this it is advisable not to tighten these rails down too firmly to the extrusion in hopes they keep their original shape however the ideal option is to only mount linear rails to precision ground surfaces fortunately aluminum extrusion is more than straight enough for the linear motion requirements of 3d printing but back to my mgn 9h 350 millimeter linear rail what is up with that naming scheme well it's how high when a premium rail manufacturer specifies their rails these are knock offs but still rely on the same nomenclature the mg stands for mini guideway the n stands for narrow the nine refers the nine millimeter width of the rail the h is the length of the carriage and the 350 millimeters is the total length of the rail if you mix up any of those numbers and letters when you purchase your rails for boron then you will have compatibility issues for example mgn 9c rails have a smaller carriage with a tighter hole pattern that does not line up with the voron parts i'm going to finish greasing all eight rails and then i'm going to mount four of them for the z-axis while i was greasing up the rest of the rails i was thinking about how my conversation about the aluminum extrusion motion systems like this one with the v wheels came across and i do want to point out that these linear rails did not make the system obsolete this is significantly stronger than this rail so this is great for applications where your tool is much heavier like with a cnc router than with a 3d printer so because the extruder weighs almost nothing you can get away with a super small rail now they make bigger uh linear guideways but those actually are very expensive and cost prohibitory when compared to a system like this with that cleared up we can throw on the four rails for the z-axis with these rails mounted for the z-axis the next step is to assemble the motor mounts for each of the rails one of the interesting features about this printer is that it uses belts to drive the z-axis lead screws are more common for z-axes but as i pointed out in past videos lead screws can wobble which can cause inconsistent movements of the tool head this is more of an issue at really long lengths like with this 1500 millimeter screw that i used in my plasma build but there are some artifacts that do still arise with smaller lead screw lengths like those used in 3d printers personally i like the belts because of how quiet they are with belts on every axis paired with trinamic stepper drivers the loudest part of the printing operation is the fans the drawback of the z-axis belt drive is that it is more complicated to put together the stepper motor has a 16-tooth pulley that drives an 80-tooth pulley for a 5-1 gear reduction this prevents the z-axis from falling when the power is switched off the 80-tooth pulley drives the shaft connected to a 20 tooth pulley which is connected to the large belt loop that moves the gantry up and down i use my cnc mill to cut a flat into that shaft to make sure those set screws on the 80 tooth and 20 tooth pulleys don't slip any lost motion between the motor and z-axis belt is going to cause the gantry to get all twisted again i'm not going to cover the voron 2 sub-assemblies piece by piece you can slow down the video if you want because i am doing everything visually here i'm just trying to keep this video a little more manageable all this stuff is very clear in the manual i'll make sure that i slow down at any part where things get a little bit confusing and walk you through that so you can see here for this piece i missed two heat inserts i was usually just putting them in as soon as they came off the printer if you haven't seen this before they're basically these uh brass threaded pieces with barbs on the outside that prevent them from being pulled out when you thread a bolt into them they're pretty nifty and they make 3d prints way more useful because you can actually attach other things to them now you can kind of 3d print larger threads with an fff printer but the metal threads on even this small m3 bolt are going to be much stronger it's metal versus plastic so this is something you will have to be careful about throughout kind of the build most parts are mirrored so you can see that this is going to be for the left z axis front left front right this guy is going to stay on the right side on the left and there'll be a little thing that's going to slide right here that's going to help tension this belt one of my favorite parts about the voron design is that each assembly plays multiple roles yes this is important for the z drive but it also functions as a foot for the printer which will give clearance for the electronics which sit in the bottom pretty sweet now before i can install these feet slash z drives and motors i do need to insert the bottom panel because those feet will block my axis that will sit there and what's kind of cool is that this bottom sheet will be kept in place by these din rails which will ultimately hold the electronics [Music] i'm going to get that attach it and attach the feet [Music] the four main z-axis belt loops are going to travel through their corresponding z-drive but they need something at the top of their travel in order to keep the belt straight enter the idler assembly now this is pretty simple it basically just holds on to a smooth idler which is a pulley that rides on bearings and can spin freely but what's cool about this assembly is that this idler will move up when you tighten this m3 bolt this will allow you to tighten the belts it's very important that you get all the slack out of the timing belts so that there's no lost motion now you may have noticed these arches above these two holes for these bolts and i think they are supposed to be eyebrows because this is an idler oof that hurt i can now permanently add the build plate which i machined in my most recent cnc router video definitely check that out if you haven't already but as a quick synopsis i started with a precision aluminum plate and cut it down to size while adding these slots and holes for mounting now this is going to be a heated build plate so i opted for this 500 watt silicon heater this heater takes 120 volts and will heat up super quickly it's both more dangerous but also in some ways safer than a 24 volt heater it's more dangerous because obviously you have a higher voltage but it's safer because you have less current because you have a higher voltage lower current lets you use smaller wires smaller wires are easier to manage less likely to snag or get torn or be improperly sized i'm going to mount the build plate at these four spots technically it's better to use a three point mounting configuration because this allows the aluminum plate to grow more evenly when it's heated the four point mount will cause the plate to taco because the middle is restricted so it must go up or down when heated i don't have a third piece of aluminum extrusion for the three-point mount but this would be easy to change in the future if i see significant deformation of the plate now it's time to build the flying gantry because the bed remains stationary the gantry has to move in all three dimensions up down left right forward and back i'm going to time lapse through the build of the gantry but once i finish i will talk about how a cool belt trick can relocate both the x and y motors off the moving parts of the gantry this will keep the extruder light allowing it to rapidly accelerate more on that coming up [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] this flying gantry relies on a lot of 3d printed components to maintain the orthogonality between the y-axis and the x-axis making sure everything is at a right angle is extremely important especially when you have two y-axes because if one is leaning one way or the other if there's not perfect parallelism the x-axis will bind up as it rides along the rails this is known as racking and it's not ideal at all it needs to be removed the problem with 3d printed components is that they can be situated in a couple different ways and they have a little bit of flexibility to them that it takes a little bit of tweaking all of the connections until you minimize racking you have right angles at all these different joints and it takes a little while you can see that as i move the x-axis along the y-axis that the y-axis are flexing a little bit but i was able to get most of that movement out and i will adjust the rest of it out once i have this on the z-axis the last thing i need to do before installing the belts was to put the tool carriage on its rails now i'm going to talk about what these white wires and magnets are doing a little bit later don't worry about that now what is important is that this carriage moves freely without binding now it moves on two separate linear rails for stability and as we talked about earlier with multiple rails you have to worry about parallelism so what i did was made sure that this rail on the front was nice and straight and then the rail on the underside i loosen those and let it come to its natural position when i move the carriage back and forth and this allows this thing to move straight because that front rail is straight but super stable because it's also attached on the underside again just constantly keep moving everything around if something feels stiff and it's not installed right and this right now is when you're going to have the best opportunity to make changes not when it's in the enclosure and with that we can do the belting it's going to be a little bit hard for you to see exactly what i'm doing with the belting because it has to go into so many different nooks and crannies but take a look at this schematic and you can see that the two paths are symmetric but one's a little bit higher than the other [Music] [Applause] [Music] i'm gonna go ahead and mount the flying gantry up on the z axes just so it's easier for me to walk you through exactly what's going on here i am going to have to set up the belt for the v-axis as well super simple through this idler at the top as well as the 22 pulley at the bottom there's four [Music] ah okay so i made a small mistake i used the wrong aluminum extrusion for the y-axis i have enough parts to build one more printer and i got a couple extrusions mixed up but that's okay i'm gonna quickly switch it out it needs to be about 20 millimeters shorter you know i try and build these things one time off camera to avoid mistakes like this but they always seem to pop up anyways i'll switch this out and then i'm going to come back like nothing happened wow that was not a small mistake once i switched out the aluminum extrusion on the y-axis for the correct length ones you can see the extrusion no longer extends past this plastic part it's got this cut out which will fit nicely on the back of the frame i had to redo the belting as well as deracking the gantry this is one of those mistakes that make you go why am i building a 3d printer when i can buy one hit that like button if you could relate you know once i got it working again i was like oh this thing is so sweet that's why i'm building it so i'm gonna hopefully carry that momentum to completion oh please please fit oh baby [Music] [Music] with the z-axis belting complete i can cut the zip ties that were previously holding up the gantry and what you'll be able to see is that even though the z-axis is made up of belts the gantry does not drop when the z-axis does not power and that's purely from the gearing inside these z drives pretty cool making sure that all of these different belt loops are properly tensioned is really important if the belt loops are too loose then rotation of the stepper motor may not amount to movement in the printer lost steps are never a good thing if the belts are too tight you could have premature belt wear unfortunately it's kind of difficult for me to describe what the right belt tension should be there are formulas that say for a given belt length it should deform x amount when you put so much force on it but you know that can be pretty difficult to measure i have more luck with just kind of pressing on the belt i'm looking for kind of a firm resistance to the press but it still deforms some amount i don't want to be so taunt that i can't move it with my thumb i also listen to the printer if i hear clicking of the belt around the pulley it's either too tight or maybe it's even way too loose and you know i'm just looking for that nice 3d printer sound fortunately it's super easy to tension belts with this design it would have been a huge drawback of this printer if it was difficult to tighten the six different belt loops or if when you did tension the belts correctly if they lost that tension over time but fortunately this whole mechanism is very well thought out we've already kind of gone over it for the z-axis when you tighten this bolt up here it will pull the idler up which will expand the belt loop making the belt tighter for the belts on the gantry it's very similar except for your tensioners are here on your left and right your right one is going to be your top belt and your left one is going to be your bottom belt by tightening this m3 bolt on either one you will expand the belt loop making the belt tighter you want both gantry belt loops to have the same tension or else the motion is going to favor one loop over the other which isn't good this is a great segue into talking about what is going on with the kinematics of this 3d printer or how exactly do we get motion from two separate belt loops in two separate motors you know this is known as a core xy setup and it's much different than a typical cartesian setup where you have a motor or a pair of motors that independently drive an axis but with a core xy setup that is not the case in fact in order to move in the x or y direction you have to have both motors moving but what if only one motor moves i'm going to hook up these two stepper motors to my microcontroller so we get a closer look at it because really with this seeing is believing it's kind of hard to explain i'm going to have the back right motor which is the a motor rotate and that is going to move the top belt as you can see when just one motor rotates the print head moves in a diagonal line now just not just any line this is a line that's at a 45 degree angle really interesting if i have the motor rotate in the opposite direction we move backwards along the diagonal line i'm going to switch to the left motor which is the b motor here we go as you can see when the b motor moves it moves on a diagonal line that's perpendicular to that first diagonal line but still at a 45 degree angle from what you might expect let's go ahead and wire up both the motors so the outcome of this is already kind of known since you saw me move the head but if i move in the y direction both motors rotate if i move in the x direction both motors rotate i'm going to drop some links in the description below for those who want to take a deeper dive into the theory of core xy systems but the big takeaway is that neither the a nor the b motor sit on the print head so there's very little inertia that has to be overcome when accelerating the extruder core xy is synonymous with speed you want fast print speeds you want to go with this kinematic system core xy printers of course have their drawbacks they require a lot of components and that belting gives you an upper bound for how big your printer can be the longer your belt loops the harder it is to tension them really long belt loops require super rigid construction of the frame so they can withstand the tension of the belt with that fairly difficult topic out of the way we can start to put together the printhead which will contain the extruder as well as the extrusion drive but before we work on those two important items you typically install an inductive probe like this right in the center of the carriage this probe will measure the distance of the printhead from each corner of the build plate these distances should all be the same which would mean that the gantry is in perfect parallelism with the build plate which is important for that first layer as well as the dimensional accuracy of your prints if the inductive probe tells the microcontroller that one of these corners is a high or low spot well that can be corrected because each corner of the gantry is independently driven so if this corner is high it can be brought down by just driving this motor pretty cool this process is known as quad gantry leveling inductive switches detect metallic surfaces through changing magnetic fields so they don't have to actually make contact with the surface they are sensing this contactless operation is great because internal components won't fatigue and plastic left behind from past prints does not alter the magnetic field and therefore is not sensed that's all great in theory but there are a couple problems with inductive probes one of those is thermal drift the inductive probe sensitivity will change based on ambient temperature with this being an enclosed printer you don't want your probe to be affected by hot or cold spots or else your gantry is not going to be level and trust me you want to perform your quad leveling when the build plate is heated because it grows during this process and you want to probe at printing conditions another problem with using an inductive switch to probe a 3d printer's bed is that if you're using a magnetic build plate that has independent magnets then the location of the probe whether it's over a magnet or not will affect its trigger height however magnetic beds that use one continuous magnetic sheet will be okay but while we're talking about bed materials it's important to note that things like glass or pei sheets they will not trigger the probe because they're not metallic and so if those materials are too thick you'll actually crash your extruder before the probe triggers now all these reasons only played a small part in my decision to forgo this inductive probe the main problem is that the probes i purchased are super cheap i have three of them and each one has a drastically different trigger height and trigger speed which is alarming since they are all the same model also i've seen other users report that the radiant heat of the hot end will start to melt the plastic housing and i believe it look at how close it is to the nozzle now i probably could have had more luck if i purchased one of these probes from a reputable vendor but this wouldn't solve the thermal drift problem or the other ones that i mentioned and it would be a costly upgrade since i'm building multiple printers instead i'm opting for a user mod known as clicky now before i get into the actual mod i want to emphasize that if you're building voron 2 for the first time build it completely to stock and make sure it works the mods are less supported on discord so if you're having trouble you're going to have to remove them anyways fortunately clicky is a drop in replacement for the inductive probe so it's really easy to make the change if you want to let's go over how this mod works instead of the inductive probe we have a good old-fashioned mechanical switch but the mechanical switch is parked away from the printhead when it's not in use so that it does not melt from the intense heat of the extruder when the printer is ready to do a quad leveling procedure the printhead which has magnets on the bottom of it will go back to the dock that has the mechanical switch it will pass over it and the magnets on the print head will meet up with the magnets on the switch it can then come forward probe the bed bring the mechanical switch back to the dock and move sideways to shear off those magnets and leave the mechanical switch behind since there are no apparent electrical connections between the microswitch and the printhead how will the microcontroller know when the switch has been triggered during a probing routine now what's interesting is that these electrical connections run through the neodymium magnets now these magnets left uncoated would corrode so they actually have a very thin layer of nickel around their perimeter this nickel is conductive so the left and right magnets are touching the normally closed and common leads of the microswitch respectively the magnets on the printhead are attached these two wires so when these magnets are attached to the magnets on the microswitch these two wires represent the normally closed in common of the switch here i've set up a quick demonstration with my multimeter there will be continuity when the button's not clicked the multimeter will beep and it will be silent when the button is clicked [Music] the assembly of clicky required no soldering whatsoever it was very easy to put together and i'm really excited to see how much better this performs over the inductive probe because the mechanical switch can pick up glass plastic surfaces as no problems with magnets really the only drawback is that this mod has more moving parts and mechanical switch will be affected by bits of plastic left behind from previous prints but it really doesn't get much cheaper than this and its operation is very predictable it's either clicked or it's not clicked it's not a black box like an inductive probe let's get into the important bits for a 3d printer the extrusion drive and extruder you would think that with all the previous talk about keeping the gantry light i would have implemented a bowden setup where the extrusion drive sits on the frame but the responsiveness and print quality of a direct drive setup is always my preference even if the cost is a little bit of speed just as a reminder the extrusion drive is the assembly that grips the filament and pushes it into the extruder for a waron 2 there are basically three options for a direct extrusion drive which are clockwork galileo and lgx i have to admit that it's getting harder and harder for me to keep up with all the different naming schemes across 3d printer platforms but here's a quick overview of those three types of extrusion drives clockwork is the standard extrusion drive that is bundled with all the other stl files when you download it is very similar to the bondtech bmg extruder and actually uses the same gears galileo is a lighter extrusion drive great for high speed performance and the lgx is a commercial product made by bond tech and has larger gears for better filament gripping i think that galileo also uses the larger bond tech gears but don't hold me to that one if you're new to the voron project then you're going to want to stick with clockwork i've had great luck with it and it's the one i'm going to build now just a side note if you go to the voron website and click on extruder you will find the mobius 4 or m4 extruder this is for bowden setups [Music] [Music] next we have the assembly that contains the extruder and cooling fans and is known as the afterburner this blower fan in the top is what gives voron its fighter jet appearance the afterburner is compatible with the three aforementioned extrusion drives and natively supports three extruders the mosquito dragon and v6 i'm going to use the e3d v6 because i've had a couple laying around from past projects so on this side we have the standard afterburner which uses a 40 20 blower fan in the top the air that leaves this fan will come down the shroud on either side of the nozzle and cool the part so when you turn part cooling on the blower fan turns on i print a lot of pla which loves to be cooled and this 40 20 blower fan is a bit anemic for this application this is why i've decided to use bad noobs a b b n mod which allows for a larger 5015 blower fan to be used for increased part cooling just to put some numbers out there the 5015 blower will have about 50 percent more airflow than the 4020 about 6 cfm to 4 cfm just for completeness i'll show you how to put together the stock afterburner it's pretty simple you just have to remove that top lid of the 40 20 blower fan and that will fit into the 3d printed housing from there you add the front of the blower assembly and then you move on to the fan for the cold end of the extruder now this is just a normal 40 20 fan and it's a friction fit what's cool here is that you use a little piece of filament as a hinge between the blower and the part cooling plastic pieces that component is attached to the shroud which also holds the extruder those pieces will look a little bit different depending on which extruder you end up picking putting together the 5015 afterburner mod is basically the same process it's a little bit more of a hassle to get the blower fan to fit up in its housing because you have to cut off the ears i just took a quick hacksaw to them and then sand it off any uneven surfaces [Music] [Music] [Music] now i've already shown you guys two mods clicky as well as this larger blower fan but there are so many more mods the voron community has reached a critical size where almost any mod you could think of already exists nozzle wipers purge buckets cases for any of the number of displays that can be used on a 3d printer leds and more led mounting options it seems like a lot of people that made these mods were inspired by the effort that the voron dev team put into all of their documentation because almost all of these mods are thoroughly documented and have undergone multiple revisions which is awesome now it can be a little bit hard to sort through all the different mods so i like to use fake.org kind of a weird website name but it's a great way to search for mods that may be useful for your war on build [Music] so as you just saw i installed the limit switches for the x and y axes and with that all the electronics are done for the gantry now it's time for everyone's favorite part wire management i'm kidding of course wire management's difficult on a normal 3d printer it's even harder on a core xy because there's so many moving electronic components that we're going to need a minimum of three drag chains now these drag chains that were prescribed by the bill of materials are quite small both in cross-sectional area and in their bend radius look at how tight that is now tight bend radiuses are problematic for normal wires like this four conductor pvc speaker wire because as the printer is moving rapidly back and forth it's going to have to come in and out of that bend really quickly it's eventually going to wear so for this application we're going to want some flexible wire this comes in the form of stranded wire insulated with silicone it is ultra flexible if you wanted the ideal wire for this application you're going to want a teflon coated wire now that's too expensive for me the teflon coated wire has a property of being self-lubricating so that when you've got multiple wires in a drag chain they can all kind of slide past each other within that bend radius teflon wire is going to have ultimate wear resistance now as i said teflon's a little bit too expensive for me and i've actually never worn through a silicone wire before so i'll let you know if that happens so the x-axis drag chain is going to sit back here and move back and forth with the print head now there's quite a few wires that have to run through this drag chain even though this is a single extruder setup you've got the four wires from the motor you've got the two wires from clicky the probe you've got four wires two from each fan you have the thermistor wires and the heater wires all those wires and there's not much room in that channel we need to use as small of wires as possible so that everything can fit in here but we don't want to use too small of wires that it's dangerous please check this current chart here because your wire gauge your wire diameter is going to be dependent on the amount of current running through it too much current through a small wire is going to be a fire hazard and don't follow my wiring sizes blindly make sure you check your components but i'll quickly go over what i'm using for the stepper motor i'm using this 24 gauge wire this is nice because it keeps all the conductors right next to each other all four of them so i don't mix up the motor pairs later on i do want to point out that you don't want to use multi-conductor cable where you've got multiple conductors insulated and then those all wrapped in another layer of insulation because that takes up way more room for the probe i'm going to use this 26 gauge wire that i had laying around there's not much current at all running through a micro switch i'm gonna leave three wires for the probe even though we only need two just in case i need to switch back to the inductive probe later on for the fans i'm using this 28 gauge wire it actually has a white line which marks the polarity because fans are polar red needs to go to positive black needs to go to negative or else it's not going to work i'm also using 28 gauge wire for the thermistor and then i'm using 20 gauge wire for the ceramic heater that's cutting a little bit close 18 gauge may be better but i had 20 gauge in yellow got to keep the color scheme going i probably shouldn't joke about that i check with the manufacturer and this will have a little bit of extra overhead so i can safely run the correct amount of current uh through that wire for the power hungry ceramic heater i know i've harped on this a couple times throughout the video but this is going to be an enclosed printer and it'll be very difficult to switch out electrical components that break if their wires run continuously through all the drag chains so i'm going to install these locking jst sm connectors at the start of all the components before they go into that first drag chain now unfortunately the crimps for these connectors are too big for the 28 gauge wires that will be used for the fans and thermistor so i'm going to use just a normal molex connector instead make sure you buy these connectors in a kit with the corresponding metal and female crimps can be really difficult to source them individually because the naming schemes i have no idea why we haven't come up with a common way to name all these different connectors because jst literally stands for japan starterless terminals that's every connector nowadays and with that i'm going to speed you guys through the wiring process and i'll catch up with you when we talk about the controller board [Music] routing on those wires wasn't too bad i only skipped one step and that is the installation of this shroud which would technically clean up all these connectors over here but it's quite small and puts a lot of pressure on this joint so i'm going to go without it i'm sure i can find a mod that's a bigger shroud down the line but you know right now i'm happy with this the last electrical component that we need to install that's not underneath the printer is going to be the z in stop you might be wondering why do we need a z in stop if we have a probe that can pick up the height of the build plate whenever it wants well the z end stop will have a fixed height relative to the build plate this height will never change so when something is touched off the z in stop we'll know exactly how far away it is from the build plate the most important distance in 3d printing is the tip of the nozzle to the build plate that needs to be set appropriately to have a great first layer the z probe actually does not give you that distance the z probe gives you how far away the probe is from the plate now you can set the distance of the nozzle to the probe but you'll have to do that every single time you switch out the nozzle or you fiddle with the printhead with the zn stop we don't need to do that once we make any changes to the printhead we just go over touch off that nozzle and we'll figure out that new distance the addition of a z-in stop is so easy and low-cost i always recommend using one the design for voron's end-stop is actually really cool you have a mechanical switch that sits inside of this plastic housing if you look down its barrel you can see the little button for the end stop but around the perimeter are these ridges that accept a d flange pulley it's actually remarkably easy to flange a pulley you just pull on the end of it with some pliers you then press that pulley into place and you can stick a five millimeter shaft down the bore of that pulley that shaft will be free to move up and down and press on that switch when the nozzle touches it from the other side i'm gonna have to cut the shaft to an appropriate height but we don't do that until we install the bill plate material because we need to know exactly how tall that shaft should be the z in stop sits right behind the build plate so we can flip the printer over now and give it some power and brains my original plan for the printer software was to go with clipper honestly i was caught a little off guard by clippers rise the top of the most feature-rich 3d printer firmwares but man lock a bunch of nerds at home for a year with nothing to do and they are going to generate some really awesome printer features but the whole point of clipper is to take a cheap board or a couple of them and supercharge them with a raspberry pi however with the state of the supply chain right now there are no cheap boards and i'm not paying top dollar for an old skr board or something similar therefore i'm going to go with the duet wi-fi which is running reprap firmware 3. i had a couple of these boards laying around and reprap firmware is still my favorite user experience both for running the printer from the web interface as well as for configuring it but the duet is an expensive ecosystem and what you're getting for the extra money is diminishing especially in light of clippers features and the fact that almost every board now uses trinamic stepper drivers go ahead and leave a comment about how i'm done for using the duet on a war on build i'm ready for the criticism but you should know that all the configuration files for voron exist for the duet and it's super easy to set up because i will probably be in the minority with the duet wi-fi i'm going to time-lapse through all the wiring the only thing really to note here is that because the heated bed uses ac power we're going to have to use a solid state relay so that the duet can control the heated bed this 3d printed component is what allows for the motherboard and power supply to be connected to the din rail it's pretty ingenious this spring-like feature in the middle gives it just enough flexibility to snap onto the din rail now because voron 2 has so many stepper motors i'm going to need an expansion board for my duet so i'm going to go with the du x5 technically the dual x2 would work because that would be five stepper drivers on the main board and two on the expansion board [Music] there are guys on the boron facebook group that have wires so organized they look like they're out of an electrical cabinet of a hundred thousand dollars cnc machine those kinds of people make me sick no i'm just kidding i keep my wiring short and sweet even if it is a little bit messy but the one tip that i adhere to is that because this uses so much stranded wire remember we needed flexible wires for all the drag chains if the wires are going into a terminal they need a ferrule on them to prevent stray wires from making unintended electrical connections so that takes care of all of the dc electrical connections now we need the ac power for the power supply as well as for the heated bed an ac electrical cord will plug into this plug which sits inside of this component and this guy is part of the skirt assembly which will wrap around the entire perimeter it will tidy up this whole bottom part of voron it's also what gives this design the geometric flare with all those hexagons i think it looks pretty awesome [Music] on one side of the skirt are two fans which will blow air across the microcontroller and its stepper drivers these fans are directly wired to the 24 volt power supply so they're always on to finish up the skirt assembly i need to add the front section which will incorporate a display i'm going with the panel douay 5i which is the little brother to the 7i the larger display that you saw on my first four on the 7i was a little bit too big for voron i'm much happier with the way the 5i looks now the panel do a series of displays is not supported out of the box by voron this is actually one of my mods the display sits on an articulating arm which allows you to change the viewing angle and i also use the front skirt pieces from the 350 millimeter version of waron so that the display has to cover up less of a gap because it's not actually integrated into the skirt with the electronics and skirt complete i turned my attention to the print bed my first foreign uses just a pei sheet which has worked great for both abs and pla but i wanted to take it to the next level with my second printer here i'm using a piece of spring metal coated in pei it's a little bit textured to allow for better first layer adhesion this metal sheet is adhered to the build plate with a magnet which allows you to remove it flex it and remove your print now these magnetic print beds have been floating around the market for a couple years now but it's just not something that i've talked about on this channel so i wanted to quickly cover that the only downside to this magnetic print bed is that it's going to be twice or even three times as expensive as a glass plate or pei sheet with that magnetic sheet installed i now know the thickness of the build plate which will let me determine the height that the shaft for the zn stop needs to be i can then cut it to that height if that z in stop is too tall then the printhead will bump it when it's working on large prints which is not good so close before we add the panels to fully enclose this printer we need to make sure that everything's working as expected not only do we need to make sure that all the motors move but we need to make sure the fans turn on the extruder heats up and that we can successfully level the gantry before we enclose everything now the first step in this process is to configure the firmware to understand everything that's going on here now i'm not actually going to go through that process because again i'm in the minority with reprap firmware where most people are probably using clipper but even if i was using clipper the documentation online is far better than i could do on a video let me show you how to get there so first let's open up the voron discord channel i know that some people a little bit hesitant to use discord because it can seem a little bit chaotic but let me show you the one thing you need to know to get an answer to 90 of your questions once you're in the war on main channel you're going to want to go to the sub channel that relates to your question we're talking about firmware now so we're going to go into the duet reprap firmware subchannel at the top of the window there is a push pin which has all of the important topics pinned and the first message there has a link to a generic rep firmware configuration for voron this was created by a discord user named folg and he answers almost every single question that pops up in this sub channel the instructions that accompany this firmware configuration file will help you modify it to work with your printer the pinned messages are really a lifesaver for building a printer this complicated if you're having trouble with the afterburner then check that sub channel's pinned messages if you're having trouble with the electronics then check that sub channel's pinned messages discord may seem a little bit unorganized from the outside but the help you need is really accessible let's get back to making sure our printer works so after you've configured that firmware and you know the motors are moving the correct direction that the gantry is able to home as it should next thing we need to do is perform that quad gantry leveling to make sure that the gantry is parallel to the print bed before we call the bed leveling program we're going to loosen these z-axis joints you may be able to see that there's a little bit of curvature here they almost act like ball joints this will give the gantry a little bit of play when they're loosened which will allow the gantry to come to a natural rest a natural position during the bed leveling process we don't want the gantry to resist what the software has determined as it being level with the printer under power we can home all axes it takes care of the y and x it's now going to go touch off that shaft which actuates the z in stop with that taken care of i will enter in the g32 command which will call for quad gantry leveling the first thing the printhead will do is go pick up clicky which will tell how far the printhead is from the bed it's going to check that distance for all four corners it's then going to take the difference between each corner and use that information to change the height of each corner it will repeat this until that trigger distance between each corner is within some small air here you can see the adjustments it's making to each belt it's calling it a lead screw but it means a belt after each pass the deviation is 0.002 and with it being 0.001 it stops it drops off the clicky and it re-homes i will repeat this leveling process more than a couple times before tightening everything back down i think it would be a major disservice if i pretended like this is all it takes to level a voron there are a lot of small problems that can pop up with my first four on i had a lot of twists because my main rail was slightly misaligned which manifested in some really bad first layer adhesion due to the length of this video i made the conscious decision not to get into the weeds of calibrating this printer because not everyone will have these problems but one thing's for sure the bigger you go with your voron design the more likely these problems are to pop up i will drop a link to a website that talks about solving that twist problem but discord is going to be your friend for weird calibration issues that arise on your first layer and with that we can enclose the printer while i'm installing the acrylic panels let's talk about the benefits of enclosing your printer it probably goes without saying but an enclosure will keep dust and dirt off of your linear rails and print bed if you are in a workshop environment then this reason alone could warrant adding an enclosure to your next build most people however use an enclosure to decrease warping when printing parts out of abs i talked about this briefly way back in the beginning of the video but an enclosure will trap the heat from the hot end and the bed keeping the air around the part closer to the glass transition temperature of abs this decreases thermal gradients and prevents internal stresses from building up that manifest as corners and edges curling up from the build plate the other problem with printing abs is the fumes that are given off while abs may smell the worst out of all the printable plastics 3d printing any type of plastic will emit toxic particles and gases when heated these thermoplastics produce volatile organic compounds or vocs for short which include benzene ethylbenzene and toluene these noxious fumes can irritate your eyes or make you feel dizzy if you inhale enough of them fortunately activated carbon filters are pretty good at removing these vocs from the air voron 2 has an exhaust fan on the back that pulls air out of the chamber through a stack of carbon filters if you keep the exhaust fan on during the entire print then you will have a slight negative pressure in the enclosure so that the vocs can't escape without going through the carbon filter first when printing with abs you will have to keep the fan speed a little lower so that you don't cool the chamber too much but in my experience the setup seems to work well keep in mind that activated carbon filters will lose their ability to pull the vocs out of the air so you must be diligent about replacing them unfortunately vocs are not the only pollutant that you have to worry about forcing thermoplastics to a hot extruder will produce ultrafine particles these particles cannot be pulled out of the air by a carbon filter and their small size means they are readily absorbed by your lungs these particles will then enter your bloodstream and hide out in distant organs their long-term effects are not really known but this publication in the environmental science and technology journal show that these particles were toxic to cells in a dish this can sound a little scary but in the thermoplastic molding industry workers have been able to mitigate most respiratory and other negative health effects by working in spaces with ample ventilation so you should do the same with your printers this printer is looking epic i'm going to add some leds to the top of the extrusions to make sure that the print will be lit up as well as some of the internal components i cut this 90 degree diffuser channel into three separate pieces all the sides but the back will get the leds i have to solder two conductor wire between each section of the leds because the z-axis idlers prevent me from getting a clean wrap around these are 12 volt leds but my power supply is 24 volts fortunately the duex expansion board has a 12 volt regulator that can supply up to 2 amps for this very purpose it's time for the maiden print i will start off with the calibration cube that comes with the sdl files for the voron printer i've been talking so much about abs that i can't switch the pla now so the first print will be out of this red abs from hatchbox i have not performed any behind the scenes calibration of the filament just gonna let it rip the bed temperature is 100c the extruder is at 250 c cooling fan is off chamber fan is at 20 percent and the print speed is 60 millimeters per second i could go faster but this model is so small the layer time would be too short that doesn't look bad at all i do have to admit that i've never been too invested in achieving an absolutely blemish-free surface finish i typically buy a filament that's on sale and i end up with a bunch of different brands which makes it difficult to have a profile for each type and brand of filament i care most about dimensional accuracy let's take a pair of calipers to this cube and see how we did this cube should be 30 millimeters in all dimensions it's spot on in the z but it's about a hundred microns short in the x and y i can make some adjustments there now let's take advantage of this massive build plate as well as my upgraded part cooling fan if i switch the part cooling fan on i can definitely feel the difference in the airflow between this mod afterburner that uses the 5015 blower fan versus the stock afterburner that uses the 40 20. i'm gonna switch to pla and print these two large gears that i will be using in an upcoming video my printing parameters for this is going to be 120 millimeters per second for the speed and 3 000 millimeters per second squared for the acceleration i'll keep the doors open with a chamber fan set to 100 percent [Music] what my [Music] the only thing better than two vorons is three borons and man i could watch these guys print all day long but i do not need this kind of 3d printing power in my garage especially since i already have the epsilon so i'm really excited to announce that i am donating these printers to a local after school program in nashville that mentor students and prepares them for life after high school these students don't usually have access to 3d printers so i'm hoping that being able to create their own models and realize them in real life will encourage some of them to go down the engineering path if you want to see how those efforts pan out then follow me on instagram because i will be posting updates there if you enjoy these mega guides then hit that like button below and get subscribed because this is only the beginning of my added manufacturing content for this year i gotta figure out a way to get this massive pelt extruder on a c and c axis so that we can print some furniture and with that i'll catch you guys in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Dr. D-Flo

Views: 112,473

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Id: uh-8_YDhIVM

Length: 76min 38sec (4598 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 15 2021