Using TITANIUM and CARBON fiber on your 3D Printer

achieving speed requires two things fours and distance in 3D printing the distance is kind of dictated by the shape of the part being printed although we set the slicer and the printer's firmware for a certain speed value the true speed obtained is affected by the amount of acceleration we apply to the start and stop of each move there is a pretty neat tool on prusa's website that will tell you the true speed obtained at every stage of a traveled or print move as you can see in this example if I request a print move of 100 millimeter long to be done at a speed of 300 millimeter per second and I apply an acceleration of 5000 millimeter per second Square the printhead will reach the requested speed for only half of the entire move the other half of the time the printhead will be ramping up in speed or slowing down as we cannot increase the available travel distance there is only one way to reach higher speeds more acceleration acceleration is the change in speed over a period of time so for each elapsed second how many more millimeter per second have you increased the travel speed Newton's first law of physics states that every object will try to keep doing whatever it is currently doing if it is not moving it will try to stay that way unless you apply an external Force to it how much force will you need to apply on your print head in order to accelerate it at those high speeds the answer will be found by using the second law from Isaac Newton Newton said that we will need a force equal to the product of the object's mass times the change in speed we induce to it in other words mass times acceleration okay now back to our 3D printers so we have two choices more power more power thank you James or less Mass we did a lot of things to increase the power over the last couple of months the speed boat race challenge was a great opportunity to come up with creative manners in increasing the available power to move the print head faster more Motors More Voltage more performant Motors and so on we will cover these in another video but today let's focus on reducing the inertia of the moving masses the heaviest fast-moving Parts on a core XY printer are definitely the x-axis cross member assembly which moves back and forth on the y-axis one good way to reduce its weight is to trade the aluminum Extrusion for a carbon fiber tube you can find a link to my source of supply for that carbon tube in the details section here below I also swapped the 12 millimeter wide linear rail for a much lighter nine millimeter one then I installed titanium Hardware everywhere I could to better understand and qualify the gains in acceleration this mod will give me I came up with a small test plan using a custom G-Code I simulated back and forth print moves along the y-axis after every 10 repetitions the G-Code will increase the acceleration level by a factor of 1000 millimeter per second Square the test will start at 10 000 millimeter per second Square then I just have to execute and keep my finger very close to the cancel button and wait until the step Motors will start skipping steps I am using for this task the ldu keyboard Nema 23 motors for which you can find the specs here below I repeated this test for several times with different motor amp values ranging from 0.8 amp to 2 amps now that we have our Baseline data let's remove this x-axis and modify it [Music] the current x-axis assembly weighs just under 900 grams I suspect that making it lighter will increase the max acceleration we can get for each amp value let's get to work the installation of a carbon fiber tube can turn out to be quite tricky I have developed a few methods and tricks that will help you along the way these carbon fiber tubes are not perfectly straight so we have to identify the straightest face with the help of a straight edge that I used for cylinder head flat nest in my younger days I simply placed a flashlight behind it and laid down the carbon fiber on the straight edge if any light bleed occurs this means the surface is not entirely flat oh this one seems better after doing three of those tubes I noticed that the surface where the wrapping seam is visible is the straightest carbon fiber is a composite material and can delaminate when Machining to avoid as much as possible the cutting tool from pulling fiber and delaminating it I apply a tight layer of masking tape around the area to be cut that also helps a lot for marking a thin abrasive disc with high RPM works the best to cut this material but be careful cutting carbon fiber can release fine particles in the air which you don't want to breathe protect yourself adequately I've got that covered and we cut [Music] remember our flattest surface we will position the linear rail on it using these printed alignment tools I printed two extra inner blocks out of pla to support the material while drilling the M5 holes that I'm using on the awards Carriage this will help to avoid the fiber from chafing and delaminating we will use the rail and the Y Carriage to align the M5 hole location now time to switch drill bit and let's not forget to increase the drill RPM when drilling smaller diameters this is thin and hard material low pressure and high RPM will do the trick but let the drill work its way down without forcing it once that first M3 hole is done let's secure the rail properly and align it with the printed tools and we drill the other holes at every second location [Music] foreign and we're good for the next step placing the M3 nuts and washers inside the tube looks pretty tricky but with the help of a printed positioning tool this should be much easier this tool has cavities in which the nuts will have to be carefully inserted then a washer placed on top the washer will reduce the chances of damaging the tube during the installation and will avoid the assembly from becoming loose over time with vibration this installation will be permanent if you ever want to remove the rail you will have to cut the tube open for that reason we need to make sure the M3 screws are inserted perfectly straight into the positioning tool to avoid cross threading during the installation using a long M3 screw with the head cut off in the Press drill mandrel will help us to drive the M3 nuts in place properly titanium M3 nuts foreign [Music] ly driving them into position one by one [Music] it's time for the washers make sure they're flat [Music] and we are ready to insert the loaded positioning tool into the tube I am using small Dremel sanding barrels as a spring to keep the nut tool pressed against the tube internal face and the second one here then push the tool until aligned with the rail holes I could probably have used some sort of Loctite for this but wasn't sure about the reaction with the carbon fiber tube and the resin super glue will help preventing the nuts from loosening under vibration in this case once all screws are tightened it is time to remove the nut positioning tool a simple push of the sanding barrels with a Long Rod and then using a screwdriver to release the tool from the nuts and we're done look at this nice piece one small secret I kept to myself until now is that I've been using a carbon fiber Rod instead of a five millimeter metal shaft to hold one of my idler pulley on my HD havort let's see how a few months of abuse left marks on it I see some traces of oil and that's pretty much it it is in perfect shape which means this is a totally viable solution for what we're going to be doing today now let's see how much weight are we gonna save with those carbon fiber shafts wow we're saving just over 17 grams with this simple modification we are now ready to assemble all of these shiny parts and make this super light X assembly inner blocks are inserted in the tube to avoid crushing it with the carriage [Music] now some screws and the voila here comes the extruder and hot hand assembly I just can't get my head around how that thing is light the new weight of this complete X assembly is just under 540 grams let's put this on the machine while the installation is happening in the background I would like to thank you for supporting my YouTube channel if you have not subscribed yet I invite you to do so by subscribing not only you'll be the first to be notified of a new new content I publish but you also encourage me at producing more and better content if you would like to help me even more you can find the details on how to support me here below okay we're now all set belts are tight you're subscribed carbon fiber tube is installed it's nice outside what can we ask more and we're ready to do that test I'm using obviously the same test profile as before but this time around I ran into a problem this new installation outperformed my expectations and the test plan was maxing out at an acceleration of 42 000 millimeter per second Square to my great surprise this new light X busted right through my predictions and it only took a motor current of 1.6 amp to achieve 43k of acceleration my surprise was even greater when I saw the final results are you ready well hold on let's just bring back the previous chart so we have it fresh in our memory okay you got this now ready well here it is an impressive 56 000 millimeter per second square of Maximum Y axis acceleration before the motor skip steps the curves are really taking two different tangents the heavy x-axis was clearly capping out at around 1.7 or 1.8 amp of motor current by looking at the curve from the light one I would be super curious to run the test at even higher current value but I have already fried one duet controlled board during this test when going over 2.2 amps so I'm not too eager to go there again so in conclusion I think we can clearly say if not without a doubt that weight reduction is a very efficient performance enabler just like in any other field of activity where performance is required I hope you enjoyed this video and if you have suggestions on more weights saving ideas leave a comment here below I'm always happy to read you thank you and happy printing

Channel: MirageC

Views: 124,774

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Id: AqlP5ar3LkE

Length: 12min 58sec (778 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 04 2021