DIY Metal 3D Printer Using A TIG Welder

how's it going it's al you may be wondering what this big old thing is well we're revisiting the 3d metal printer yeah i didn't have any intention of doing this when i posted the last video but i got a ton of comments suggesting that i try putting a tig welder on it and it got me interested man so today we're gonna try and put a tig welder on my 3d metal printer and see if it improves anything open the castle doors here now then first things first the enclosure now i've cleaned it up as much as i can without using a grinder it's covered in spatter i'm not just going to use the torch's argon because i'll run out of argon a quarter of the way through a print and i'm starting to get embarrassed how often i'm going to the gas getting spot to get new argon so i'm going to seal this thing up as good as i can and just fill it up with argon and hopefully i won't need to be using it as much as you may be able to imagine from the last project i'm sick of welding thin metal so i'm just gonna use silicone now to seal up the doors i've just installed this weather stripping i'll probably just hold it closed with some self tappers or something to keep it good and tight now as for these fan holes i've cut out these little things on the plasma cutter i just cut the weather stripping in half and installed a little ring on there and these just go on just like that the only number 10 screws i have are super long the only number 10 nuts i have are lock nuts so this is fun now i think that's about everything that has to happen on the enclosure so let's move on to the machine there's a few things we need to change one we plugged up those fan holes so we need a water cooled base too obviously we need to mount the tig torch we also need a wire feed and i'm probably going to use the same mig gun thing that i had on the previous iteration just have it poking out towards the bottom of the torch so starting with the thing that annoys me most i'm cutting this nasty old thing off oh god look at that nasty sludge now that we got this cut off and ground down flat we got to start figuring out our water cooling block i got one sheet of aluminum that's big enough it's real nasty for the other side i don't have any pieces big enough so i'm just gonna have to do a dang good butt weld and you guys know how me and tig well then get along so wish me luck you don't want to see this [Music] got my plates cut out got my butt joint on here now we need to transfer the holes from this onto here and then i have these little standoffs to hold the two apart [Music] jesus then with just a little bit of persuasion these guys can be installed in the aluminum plate i got these guys welded in now i need to make the channels that will uh coerce the water into spreading across the whole plate so basically i kind of roughly drew it out on here i'm just gonna make a maze using these pieces kind of like that if i had three hands i'd show you the whole maids but you know let me weld this all in place and you can see what it's supposed to look like all right got me a little bit of a labyrinth here's my inlet and outlet and the water will have to go all the way around the plate to get to the outlet hopefully that works now for the fun job of getting the top plate installed now we can test for leaks and cool this thing off all at once come on oh man it's hot and that tubing is very melted taking a while to get to the outlet that's kind of a good sign all right so flows surprisingly there were no leaks can you believe it so now i gotta grind all this flat so that it makes as much contact with the bed as possible now then to mount this guy on this guy i went ahead and bent up this little bracket from a piece of flat bar that'll hold that on there just fine now we need to figure out where to mount our wire feed and how that's going to work so i went ahead and mounted a cup on here just to get an idea of where this thing's gonna be pointing we gotta figure out how to get this liner pointing right down towards the puddle which i i must say it's like right here alrighty here's how this is gonna work i've just sandwiched this fitting between a piece of heat shrink and the gun liner so that ain't gonna move well that ain't gonna move much then if i have to reposition this the holes are a little bit oversized so i can jiggle it around just a little bit but that's something we won't learn until later all righty got everything installed got our water cooler block you can see the tubing in the back for that torch is on and the wire feed with the torch i didn't want to take apart a perfectly good tig torch so i kind of just like bent it back a little hokey oh and we got our little limit switch pusher right there as well now then on to the electronics now i just need to decipher what the hell i was thinking when i put this together so all the ender 3 stuff can stay the same don't know that we're going to need the 12 volts anymore besides for the leds which seems silly to have this power supply for it but if i don't know how to move it and i don't got to move it right i'm not gonna need the stepper drive anymore unless i decide to drive this with a stepper i'm no longer gonna have the welder to control the wire feed so i'm gonna have to do that with the arduino i don't know i'll be back with this put together or at least with a plan put together alrighty got my electronics sorted as you can see the stepper drive is gone and in its place i have a little transistor as you also may be able to see it's no longer an arduino uno i've swapped it for a nano because there's no point in using an uno here couldn't possibly be because i shorted 24 volts over the arduino on friday i'd have to be an idiot to do that i'd have to be a real idiot to do it twice anyway everything's just about the same as the old setup it's still controlled through this relay which i'm gonna control using a fan output m106 and m107 from the ender three but now one state just turns everything off the other state will flick a relay to turn the torch on and then it will start dabbing the motor and i just used a for loop for this no more fancy curve but it's gonna dab quicker and quicker let me show you this is one state and then i've changed the code to greatly exaggerate how quickly this changes and moves just for the video you can see i turn it on it starts dabbing now i don't know if you can hear it it gets quicker and quicker until it's almost continuous there's a 100 microsecond delay between dads at the quickest state when it's actually running i'm gonna have that ramp up a whole lot slower now i'm gonna go ahead and install the enclosure on top of this thing and we can give it a test i stuck a piece of acrylic in the bottom hole because last time i ended up running it with the door open the whole time because the shots through the tinted glass sucked so this is your window this is my window beauty now i don't want to wait for silicone to dry again and i just pass these wires through so i glue so i'm not going to be using my nice welder for this i'm going to be using this old thing this is my everlast power pro 256 si it's a multi-process machine which is why i don't use it it has a um tendency to blow up so hopefully that doesn't happen on this run but it actually has a water cooled torch so i'm just cutting into the loop for the torch and adding our water cooling block for the bed to it and hopefully it can keep up we'll see all right try number one i'm just going to be doing some circles to start yeah we gotta see if everything's working i'm just gonna run the argon through like normal using the machine i'm not gonna fill the container yet because there's gonna be a lot of inspecting and adjusting to start [Music] so after some initial tests i realized this thing is not poking in the right spot we need to be real close to the puddle so i made this little piece out of aluminum and it fits on a number five cup i'll be able to clamp it down with a number eight screw so the gun liner will poke through this hole right here it'd be right up next to the tungsten i don't know if you can see that but our tungsten is right here and the wire is right there so hopefully this works better we're getting there may not look like it but it sure looks like it under the welding hood so i was noticing that the wire was having trouble getting into the puddle so i've drilled another hole in this mounting bracket so now the whole thing is tilted a little bit and these guys should meet in the middle give it a whack would you look at that that is beautiful everything was going swimmingly until the tungsten got stuck but that's just a layer height problem so i'm gonna adjust my settings give it one more test and then i think we can print something cool [Music] so i don't think aluminum was the right thing to make that part out of oh jeez i went ahead and made the same part out of steel i'm gonna give this one more test run and then we'll print something fun all right i think this thing's ready to go as you can see by my uh barnacle test sheet i'm getting sick of printing barnacles i i think we got the settings pretty close i tweaked them a little bit and we're just going to see how it goes on this full run so what we're going to try and do here i want to run it in vase mode i'm just going to print a cute little vase see how that turns out now you may notice there's a funky new limit switch in here what's that so i don't know if you remember the last 3d metal printer video and my disgrace of a time lapse [Applause] [Music] we're going to do better than that this time so this limit switch goes to an arduino leonardo hooked up to my laptop and the leonardo is running the keyboard library so it can emulate keystrokes the laptop is hooked up to this webcam hello every time that this limit switch is pressed it'll take a picture so now in between each layer the machine will do this ah now then we need to mount this somehow that'll do the added benefit of doing this off my laptop is i can use screen task to cast my screen to the server so i can monitor the machine from my other computer so hopefully that'll minimize the amount of butthole clenching in this whole process or at least i'll be clenching from afar now without further ado let's get this road on the show all right guys this is the one for real all right 23rd time is the charm right right 167 times the charm huh 213th time is the charm please try number 420 nice try 957. try number 9700 let's go well i've had quite the little nightmare here see in those last shots i was kidding when i was saying try nine thousand whatever er we're getting close to those numbers this seems to have been one of those things where you fix one problem and 10 more pop up so let me give you the rundown on what's changed since i last saw you so i was having issues with the wire sticking between rapid moves so what i did is i upped this to a number seven cup that actually gets the wire a little bit further away from where the weld pool is so every time it melts back it melts back a little further also in code i changed it so when the torch turns off there is a delay for half a second while the wire feed is off so that gives it time to melt back and get out of the way that works pretty good i've kicked the teeth out of my welder i kept having issues with this thing as i tend to i kicked the front out so i could access the points better also i was running this on 2t so it was expecting a foot pedal and it eventually just stopped working all together now i have it on 4t so in the code every time the spindle is turned on it just turns the relay on and off again and then same for turning it off and that seems to be working pretty good the added benefit of the 40 is i can use all these funky little controls so i've got uh amperage ramp up and ramp down now the biggest issue i was having was high frequency interference from this guy starting so grounding as you can see here i jam the external ground on the machine and with a screwdriver very professional i've grounded this outer case i've grounded the shielding on these wires i've grounded the control box everything's grounded and everything's grounded onto different circuits but that wasn't even enough so i took the control box and i moved it over here drastic measures so we got shielded grounded cable going from this to the machine now what i didn't take into account is the fact that those stepper drives are gonna have to push more current in order to get through those wires so i blew up the ender 3 control board moment of silence now it's just one trace on the y stepper drive it's definitely fixable but you know my shaky hands aren't soldering those traces so i threw together a cnc driver with beefier steppers and this is hooked up to my plasma cutter so now the machine is running on linuxcnc it thinks it's a mill idiot so as you can see we're gonna be printing a vase sorry about those tool paths let me let me clean those up for you we're gonna be printing a vase cross your little thingies we're going for it [Music] um [Music] [Music] for the grand reveal wow that took two full days what do we have to show for those two days the ugliest vase that i have ever seen it's pretty cool this worked at all yeah and you can kind of see the spiral pattern that's supposed to be in the vase which is kind of neat oh and the overhangs it was able to get are actually pretty good that compared to the benchy that we did previously the layers on this look much smoother it also took twice as long so give and take now there's some glaring issues here that being the shifts and layers now i don't know if that's a problem of the belts warping from the uv or whatever or a problem of um shift one needed more argon shift two bedtime it's probably the latter now i could just give you that shitty vase and call this good but i'm not happy with it man i want something impressive i want something sick so we got a few options to avoid those layer shifts option one actually install limit switches on the machine option two stay up with the machine now i don't have enough wire to actually run limit switches over to the control box so [Music] here goes nothing oh my poor health insanity now this print i'm only gonna have a time lapse for i'm not gonna take any shots of it that way i can actually close the machine and save some argon so apologies [Music] well that didn't quite go how i wanted it to here's our new vase it's a little bigger you can definitely see the pattern it is not without its problems oh but i mean for an ender three not too bad there's something stuck in there can we get that thing on a little spinner look at that that'll do i wonder if it holds water it holds water gritty well was that worth an extra two days probably not but i think this thing actually has potential this came not without its own set of problems is it perfect no is it a step forward from last time i think so let me know down in the comments if you guys want me to take this further i think we're actually kind of getting somewhere with this and if y'all want to watch i i still want to work on it so let me know either way thanks for sticking around leave a good old danger think about subscribing and thank you for watching [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Cranktown City

Views: 255,898

Keywords: metal 3d printing, additive manufacturing, 3d printing, DIY, do it yourself, metal 3d printer, 3d printer, ender 3, tig welding, tig printer, cnc welder, cnc, cnc machine, homemade, project, 3d print, metal 3d printing machine

Id: E9tVj9qJ_ns

Length: 19min 48sec (1188 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 29 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Mother-Adversary]

I tig weld for a living and this is super fucking cool and fascinating. Definitely multi-disciplinarian

[u/NostraVoluntasUnita]

Theres a company that '3d prints' actual rockets, and have specialty software for managing the warping caused by radiant heat and internal stresses.

Thats to say: This aint that, lol.

[u/Elbarfo]

That's pretty impressive.

[u/Mustachious_Smith]

Check out MetalMatters on YouTube. He is doing a pretty good job with his.

[u/neon_island]

This guy is funny