Ender 3 alignment: problems and solutions

[Music] greetings Alex ken is here again welcome to the next edition of the ender series now sorry about the long time it's been taking to get these couple videos out just been SuperDuper busy and I know I promised a little while ago I would get at least a board review out and unfortunately I started that and it got warded by it the microphone there well I got in contact with some of manufacturers and got revised versions of the boards and so hopefully I'll be able to get one of those out real soon I want to get them out by the 11th because Aliexpress and like you know banggood and all those big places they're having like their you know eleven eleven sale so hopefully there will be some pretty good deals there if I go through all this and there aren't good deals that would suck but that's just for the sake of you all so hopefully I can get that done and hopefully I can get some kind of affiliate links or something for you all and get your boards cheaper or maybe a discount code or something like that I'll see what I can do I have hmm a couple days anyway I realize I couldn't put that video up until I had at least done the rest of the assembly video which is this one right here so we had the livestream where you watch me trying to fumble it and put it together with the instructions and then I did the basic you know impressions and unboxing video and that type of thing so the rest of the like nuts and the bolts videos have to do with after the construction we have the adjustments of the printer then we have the power supply which I'll have to do that as well before I move on to electronics but then comes the electronics and then I can start doing upgrades modifications and things like that but anyway this one I wanted to do because if you did watch the livestream or if you know anything about these printers you know that there's not really a procedure for getting the whole printer Square and adjusted properly and I kind of I said in the livestream like I like Yolo super manda to level the gantry because I didn't realize there wasn't some kind of procedure and you couldn't get to all those screws in the back so I bolted the whole thing together and I was like ah it's not level just level it out like that obviously that's not the best way to do it although it was effective so there's a ton of guys for this type of thing online other videos on YouTube and there's some PDFs you can get from like the the Ender Facebook group the unofficial under Facebook group and things like that but I thought I would just put this video out and show you like the way I did it so this is not by any means a definitive guide this is just the way that I thought it would be the most useful and even before I got the printer I was like scheming ways that the layman could without expensive gear and things like that get a good adjustment on the printer and then that's the philosophy is sort of carrying on into the rest of the series so anyway yeah that's all to say that don't take this as a definitive truth and if you like any of those other methods that's fine too but I'll show you what I did show you why I did it that way and then walk you through it step by step all right here we go now I like to use a time index particularly for longer videos so check the video description to skip around to the sections that you're interested in however watching the entire video will give you a better idea of the different options as a comparing address to each other but feel free to skip around basically when you're talking about these types of mechanical systems you have a range anywhere from like perfectly adjusted but rigid and you can't mess with it all the way to way off but you can adjust it as needed so in terms of this printer there are three main problems when it comes to getting thing adjusted after you bolted together one is the alignment of the vertical extrusions that may or may not be a problem we'll get to that too is the Z leadscrew alignment that is aligning it with the motor shaft and three is leveling out the X gantry and we'll touch on all those three sections conveniently Cree LEDs released all the CAD files for this printer so I could just dump it into a CAD and use this an example so I'm just gonna pull this frame here and rip out the pieces that we need to do an illustration for this alignment and I'll just be using this still right here to demonstrate the Darius areas of the printer we're interested in so point number one the vertical extrusion alignment now this is two parts one is are the vertical extrusions cut properly and the second is how to get them when you put them on the printer so first off be sure that these are the same length and that the ends are cut square and flush easiest way to do that without precision measuring tools is just to lay them on top of each other and make sure that they're square and flush in the same length and all that stuff before you start which will become important later on so there are two different ways that this could be off one could be misalignment and the other could be rotation so misalignment like this is not as big a deal because we can adjust the distance from the one-wheel card on the left side to the other wheel card on the other side what's much more important it is if we're looking at this from the top making sure that this is not rotated all goofy because that's going to affect the operation of wheels our ability to get all three wheels on each side touching and that sort of thing so the simplest way that I could think to do it and this was suggested by somebody in the livestream comments as well is just when you're assembling this these red parts are the vertical extensions right here they slide down on to these which we'll just call the legs and then they bolt through just kind of finger tighten those bolts so that everything's there but you can still adjust it a little bit and then just lay it on a nice flat surface when you tighten those down that'll at least pull them against each other make sure that they are in line with each other and flush and that should be good enough for our adjustments look I know this is obvious but everyone out there might not be as smart as you so I have to put this kind of section in here Shh and if you want to make sure that these sides are aligned it's pretty simple to just take any kind of flat object and put it against the side here while you have it lying down on the flat table before you tighten down the bolts okay so we got the simple stuff out of the way let's move on to the stickier things number two is the Z leadscrew alignment now first thing this is very important for what we're gonna be doing unplug yo Z motor fortunately they use these jst connectors you could just unplug right at the motor body and that's very convenient so go ahead and do that so folks that have had problems with the alignment on a z-axis and the subsequent like binding and banding and things like that if they didn't just assemble it or adjust it wrong there are three major places where this breaks down to that we'll have to look at one is the parts choice by creel the second is the parts quality from wherever they get those and then the third is the manufacturing tolerance of the various assemblies and sub assemblies so as far as parts choice what I'm referring to is this right here which is the coupling between the z-axis stepper motor and the actual Acme lead screw they chose to use a rigid coupling which is fine if everything is all well and good and perfectly in place and I've done several videos about like these couplings and Zee alignment things like that that you can check out if you want to but the problem is that they're very unforgiving of problems and since we don't live in a perfect world usually a manufacturer would figure in that there's going to be tolerance issues or adjustment issues or runtime slipping out of adjustment issues and they use some other type of more forgiving coupling but this is an entry level budget printer so ideally they want to take two or three parts and roll them into the function of one part so where the ideal arrangement will be a more flexible coupling and then a mount for the motor and a separate mount for a thrust bearing pillow that's gonna take the weight of the gantry off of the actual motor shaft itself and allow for separate adjustment that requires more parts more complexity and more possible places for user error in assembly so they went with the rigid one which works well enough in quotes if everything happens to be adjusted properly and within spec but in future videos we'll explore some options with like I said pillow box and thrust bearings and alternate types of couplings to illustrate the problem if you're having a hard time visualizing it let's say this top line is the lead screw and the bottom line is the stepper motor shaft well if those are misaligned like this obviously you're going to have problems with you know binding and stuff like that also if your nut happens to be shifted off from centerline of your stepper motor shaft then you are going to have it tilted at an angle where you're going to have these pressure points here and then here at the bottom like little stress risers where you're not going to get the nut moving as freely as it can to compensate for any inaccuracies and as you can see right here these nuts do have a little bit of play built into them so they should be able to absorb if they're not held at a bizarre angle but another issue with these is that even though they look nice and cleanly machine to the naked eye when you put them under a scope you can see that well there are varying qualities of machining going on this is my actual nut from creati which you could see is a little bit sketchy there's also the quality of the machining on the rod itself this is from my actual printer it's not actually all that bad but it's not as good as like the rod that I got from open bills that I use in my other printers you can see how much smoother this is but that's just all to say that you can see how the actual machining of the parts could lead to more or less binding and you want to give that as best a chance to just be centered as possible and be able to float to compensate and there are also various ways that you can make these nuts now this is obviously machined brass but a lot of them are sintered bronze which are impregnated with oil and self lubricating they're also Delrin and Teflon or other low friction coefficient compounds that you can use for them since ours is just brass on steel obvious he's gonna need a little bit of lubrication because it's not self lubricating doesn't have a particularly low friction coefficient now I've talked about lubrication in the past and I have a vast assortment of lubes and oils and greases and that type of thing but it's not as critical since we have sliding friction here as opposed to rolling like we do in something like a linear rail cart so you can get away with using something that's a little bit more or heavy body and you don't have to worry as much about like attracting dust and fouling up your bearings so I have currently here about like three or four different printers set up and I try to use like a different type of Lube on the lead screws of each just to see how they hold up and pretty much they've all worked fine so some have a lithium grease with teflon in it others are just like a light machine oil others are synthetic oil with teflon for something as like light duty and non continuous use as the Z screw on a 3d printer it's not nearly as critical as like a high offset load like high speed like picking place or CNC machine so find something that's not too gloopy and messy isn't gonna break down and leave a sticky mess preferably doesn't attract too much dust isn't toxic and preferably doesn't stink a lot of people use like silicone or Teflon spray that's fine it's some fairly thin and you'll have to reapply it occasionally other people use grease other people used like light machine oil like I said I've used all those various things on various printers that are currently being used every day and they all seem to work fine I think I used super lube on the Ender 3 I'll have to go back to the video and double-check but that's just silicone with Teflon in it and that should be fine now when I assembled this all I did to kind of like you know quicky align it on the live stream was I left these bolts a little bit loose like not completely finger tight but a little bit loose so that the motor could move around a little bit as well as leaving the nut a little bit loose like leave these bolts a little bit loose it'll knock back and forth and then ran the z-axis up and down a couple times to see where it wanted to naturally align itself and then tighten them down now obviously that's not a perfect method and it's not gonna work if you have kind of poorly manufactured parts but it was enough that I got a decent print without any you know binding or banding or anything like that on the live stream ideally the center line is represented by this red dot as you move that up and down you should see that the rod is not wandering to one side or another of it and if you could see as I play this again mind wanders ever so slightly just a little bit so let's talk about how we can systematically get this much more accurate now as I had mentioned before I wanted to go into this assuming that the Builder didn't have a ton of money that they want to spend didn't have a bunch of fancy equipment if you do good for you we should all be so blessed but if you don't I do consider the variety of tools that you could use for something like this as in like a depth gauge a machinist square or an artist square dial indicators etc etc ultimately I decided to just jump onto like Amazon and see what like the cheapest reasonable thing would be and you may have seen me refer to this on the live stream but I picked this guy which happens to be marketed as the tire gauge but it makes a perfectly fine depth gauge as well and because many many times less than a decent I'll indicator now there are not decent dial indicators for like twenty thirty bucks and I tried oh during a few of those like months ago and they never made it over on the slow boat from China so somewhere floating in the world are a couple dial indicators but in addition to these being like super cheap and available like domestically just about everywhere they also have these little diagnostic port so you can plug in and I don't know what kind of interface they use but I'm sure somebody has decoded it since it's probably just a standard auto industry thing and I want to be able to tie that into like a plotting program and use it for various things and again anything I say here you can just substitute with hey why don't I use calipers instead and I'll try to dig out stuff that looks decent and put like product links in the video description to all this stuff so you could take a look and make a decision on your own but essentially any device you use the principally it's gonna be about the same we're just measuring the distance between the left side of our leaf screw here and our vertical rail which is going to be what our bearings are moving up and down on so as long as that distance is the same at the top as it is on the bottom you should be cool but the problem I had with these guys is it's tough to get them flush unless you really fiddly about it like you can do with your fingers but here's an exciting product announcement I decided to spend a little time with CAD to make your lives a little bit easier and I developed something so introducing the kree ality alignment pack it doesn't slice it doesn't dice but it'll align your printer super nice Lee because grammar is important act now and get a free nubbin thing and flat john simply print out the caliper base sliding your tool put on your nubbin of choice and you're well along your way to a perfectly adjusted printer available at thingiverse.com link in the video description so hilarious infomercial jokes aside I decided to design a little bit of a rig so that you can keep this square but again if you have the cash feel free to shell out for proper tools so here's the procedure step one make sure that your nut is just a finger tight and you have a little bit of a gap here so that you can move it back and forth and adjust it as necessary step to take a baseline reading right down by the coupling on the z-axis that's what you're going to be shooting for across the entire lead screw step three try to match that measurement top and hopefully your bolster tight enough that they're holding the position a little bit but loose enough that you can still move them around so tighten that down a little bit and hopefully you're pretty close to parallel step four run the gantry up and down the z-axis a couple times by hand to make sure that it's not binding anywhere it'll move fairly quickly remember we have our z motor unplugged and then recheck your measurements to make sure that everything's parallel if you've done everything correctly you should be pretty close after justice one adjustment I was within like point zero five millimeters which is pretty darn close but if you didn't hit it on the first try rinse and repeat and then the last step I say take this and thread the axis up and down by hand just to make sure that it's not getting tight and binding at any point and that'll let you know if there's an abnormality somewhere along the z lead screw so if all was done properly and you have decently manufactured parts that should solve the whole crooked z-axis problem now if you have a gross misalignment problem like some people have first try loosening up these screws and moving the motor out as much as you can if that doesn't give you enough adjustment then you'll have to go ahead and put some shims around it or print out a new bracket but just anecdotally from what I've seen from users the majority of these problems can be sussed out on the majority of printers just what the adjustments if you can't get that solved on your printer then you probably got one where you have this bracket right here on the left side the motor side that was bent a little bit screwy in which case you can use the flexible coupling plus ball bearing method that I used in ARRA that I mentioned in a previous video and that could help you out but I would definitely contact Cree allottee and see if they can send you a proper bracket for it because they should have replacement parts for these so onto the third problem area and that's the X gantry leveling and man this seems to be a big one because if you're not aware of it there's just no way you would know this could be a problem and a lot of the hey help me with my ender threads that I've seen online when people actually show pictures of their machines the X gantry is skewed way off so if you're not aware what I'm talking about here is let's imagine this is your 3d printing bed and then this would be a flat plane along your 3d printing bed ideally you would want your ex gantry to be parallel with that but often it isn't so you get this weird skewed kind of thing in which case you're never going to get a perfectly dimension dan square print now some people have gone as far to do a quickie fix by like making the bed parallel with the X gantry which is one step better to better print but you're never going to get it perfectly square you're going to still have a parallelogram print so ideally we don't want that we just want to fix the problem now the reason this is a big pain in the butt is because of the way this printer is constructed there are four screws that hold the gantry in place and allow you to adjust it and we'll just call those a B C and D moving from left to right as in the motor side to the dummy side after you slid your X gantry on to the Z uprights you can no longer access the a and the B screws only the C and the D screws and after we've put the top bar on to it we can no longer slide the X gantry off of the Z uprights so that makes for a very awkward situation and one last term before I get into us I'm going to call these large blue things down here that are the base of the printer the legs so like I said there are a lot of like video and text guides on how to do this in various places YouTube and reddit and the unofficial and your Facebook group so I'll touch on the basic premise of some of those but I'm not going to go through this completely because you can find them somewhere else I will eventually just show you how I chose to do it so your choices are basically you can align the gantry to the legs on the bottom of the printer or to the top bar on the top of the printer or use some kind of square now I'm just going to go ahead and assume you don't have a square cuz why would you be watching this video if you already have the proper gear so they're potential pitfalls to each of the two methods and again there may be other methods but of these two methods if you align it to the legs you'll have to remove the bottom electronics cover so that you can get the same length and if you align to the top bar as I mentioned at the beginning of this video your Z extensions may or may not be equal lengths or squared on the ends so that's why I said check that at the beginning if they are square and of equal length you're good you can use a top bar method otherwise you'll have to align to the legs so first thing you do slide the bed out of the way second thing take off the bolts and remove your electronics cover so that you have a nice even surface then you could just take two equally sized objects bring your gantry down to level it on them and then tighten up the bolts for example right here I just use two CD cases one on each side and then honk down the bolts but remember we can't get two bolts a and B only C and D so a and B are going to have to be if you use this method and you leave the top bar off tighten down adequately so that you could still move it but it's not going to shift on you then you would bring it down on your two CD cases or whatever and tighten up the other bolts as in bolts C and D then you would just slide the gantry back off the z-axis upright extrusions and then tighten down bolts a and B and you should be gravy now one thing you have to bear in mind with this method is that we have to be able to adjust our wheels as well and as I think your name was Christian I'm sorry if I got that wrong pointed out to me in an email one thing that they hadn't seen mention anywhere else was that the wheels on the left and the right side tighten in opposite directions and pull against each other so a lot of people run into problems where they tighten those down and then all six wheels don't touch the z rails so essentially like if you want to be able to adjust that independently you can flip those bolts around and use T nuts to mount it or when you have to adjust for wheel where you're going to loosen up your seeing your D so that way your rail can slide left and right as you tighten down the left side you would adjust the left wheels first to make sure all three of those are touching the z rail and then you would adjust the right side and then tighten bolts C and D back down again I know it's a mess but this isn't exactly the most intuitive design now I really didn't like all that because it means that you'll have to pop your top bar off every time you do this adjustment so you'll have to do your adjustment to the wheels for wear to make sure that they're all against the rails and then check gantry square removed your top bar pulled that off and then do the whole like leveling procedure again to make sure that your parallel I wanted to cut out as many steps as possible so this is how I did it now get excited this is our first big modification to the printer here goes I put a put a hole I drilled a hole so I could get to the screw yes mankind has circumnavigated the globe put beings into space and unleash the power of the atom now with the help of Harbor Freight we have the technology wherewith we can place a halt where once there was none but we choose to make a hole not because it is hard but because it is easy JFK probably anyway it seemed like the most intuitive thing to do that way B is the only screw that has to be tight as possible and then we can adjust a and then of course we can adjust C and D because those are available to us through the other side of the printer that way we don't have to worry about taking the top bar on and off every time we have to make adjustments to like either the wheels or the square or something like that we don't have to worry about messing up the wheels like squashing them back onto the the Z extensions so yeah just what I did now option B in terms of modification are you could flip the a and the B screws drill larger holes and then use nuts on the back and secure them some way with like tooth washer so they don't spin around while you tighten them but the problem with that is they left us very little room behind this gantry here so there's not a whole lot of room do you have to play with but maybe you could stick a a really flat nut in there but seriously like if I had been consultant on this project that I've been like brah what and then there's always option C which is the other alignment last methods leave the top bar off etc etc pull it off put it on tighten them down yadda yadda but you can't adjust it on the fly it takes a lot longer you risk nicking your wheels as you squeeze them on and off that type of thing so I'll show you the two ways to do this one aligning to the bottom one aligning to the top and I'm gonna flip to the printer around backwards so our screw numbering image thing is gonna be mirrored so remember our B screw is gonna be the fulcrum so make sure that's nice and tight and lock tighted and you can see right here everything else is just kind of wham bleah and loose adjust your wheels on the motor side so that they're the proper tension not too tight not too loose and all three wheels are touching then go ahead and adjust the same thing on the dummy side so the non motor side making sure all three wheels are touching and you get them properly tensioned I like to take a silver sharpie and put a mark on my wheels so I can easily see at a glance if they're rolling or not so right here you can see they're definitely touching as I move this up and down they're rolling and they should be just tight enough that you can't stop it or roll it with your finger so once you have that all adjusted you can start to square the gantry so if you're using the level against the legs method just roll it down like this and then take whatever it is that you're using to level it with like I said DVD cases or CD cases in my case slide them underneath and then bring the gantry down against those to make sure that they're level then go ahead and tighten down the C Bolt followed by the D bolt then slide your gantry up by hand to align the a bolt with wherever it is you have your hole drilled and go ahead and finish tightening that down and you're good to go slide it back down and remeasure with whatever it is you used to level these out and double-check your work and alternatively if you have measuring tools you don't have to use like CD cases or whatever you can just use a pair of calipers or your tire depth gauge with or without the patented crap attachments option be measuring and leveling from the top I prefer this method because I don't have to slide the bed out of the way or worry about like removing electronics cover or anything like that but let me introduce you term from philosophy logic and mathematics and that's iff which means if and only if so if and only if your z rails are exactly the same length and they're square on the top then you can use a method that measures from the top bar which is what I made this little goofy attachment to do so there's a lip right here that's just meant to ride along the top and then the little nubbin attachment rides along the gantry to make sure that it's flat so of course ideally your measurement on the one side should match your measurement on the other side I guess that goes without saying but I'll say it anyway if you're clever you can go ahead and put your hole wherever it is you can access it with that little crap measurement John in place but I was impatient and I put the hole before I made the jig so you just have to slide it down to match up the screw with the hole and then tighten it down and converts you can do without burning out the jig by just flipping it upside down resting the caliper along the gantry and then measuring up to the top bar like that in the same way that we would measure with the caliper and no jig from the gantry to the bottom bar and just a reminder you can always use calipers for this as well flip pump aside down and they make a depth gauge thanks a lot for checking out the video hopefully that was helpful if you have any questions leave them in the video description below I know I've been getting way behind on questions lately but I'm doing my best and anything that I missed even if it takes a couple weeks I'll try to get back to it and if I can't get back to it because it'll take too much typing I'll do it in the next question and answer video as long as I see it like I said before sometimes they get caught in the spam folder and I don't get notified also of like replies to things that I reply to for some reason so that all sort of falls through the cracks and when I have time to rifle through hundreds and hundreds of comments I go through and try to track down those threads but you can see how easy it is to miss them so if you like this content you want to see me keep making it check out my support links in the video description below like I said I have Amazon affiliate links to the little gizmos that I mentioned in here there's also just the general click through portals where you click through that whatever you buy they kick me a percentage that's the type of thing that keeps this channel going as well as patreon supporters thank you to all of you now hopefully in the next few days I will be getting out some kind of board review fingers crossed and there are many board reviews to come as I will explain in that video hopefully if I get it out by then so catch you next video and until then get out there and make something awesome

Channel: Alex Kenis

Views: 81,383

Keywords: creality, ender, gantry, wobble, banding, how to, align, binding, leveling

Id: AN0MlQMMew0

Length: 28min 57sec (1737 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 08 2019