So I had some troubles with the quality of several of my printed parts making completion of my build impossible, fortunately that was resolved very fast by support and new parts were sent.
I managed to complete my build and seem to be up and printing well. But one thing worries me. The screw holes on the effector for the connecting arms were oversized on my first part. On the replacement part they are still oversized. The only way I was able to assemble was by pulling them forward against the side of the hole so the nut wedges into the corner and then tightening. The nut otherwise is way too small for the 4mm hole and just spins in place. Is this how they all are? It seems like something that would effect calibration because its ever so slightly effecting the angle of the arm.
I guess now that i’m printing ok I could print a new part with 3mm holes, are the models for replacement parts available at all?
Hi Robert,
As far as we know, this is how all parts are printed for the Afinibot A1 model.
Maybe printing a bushing that will take the gap between the screw hole and the screw itself ?
We forgot to add the available parts for 3D printing yourself, here is what we have.
3D Print STL-20160914T125745Z.zip (3.49 MB)
Thanks for the files, I still have to teach myself how to use blender well enough to alter them so that’s an ongoing project. But I will make good use of those.
Regarding calibration, I got it tuned in a lot better by learning the manual calibration method. The instructions that come with it for their leveling procedure totally fail to mention anything about adjusting the horizontal radius to flatten the build surface. Now that I’ve done that i have it about as good as can be expected, as the bed is not flat, a straight edge reveals. I definitely recommend for anyone else using one of these, forget all about the leveling instructions that came with it and go watch a repetier tutorial video on leveling. Now my dimensions are within .1 mm of each other which is much more acceptable than the .5 deviation I had using their instructions.
I am however suddenly having an issue with my temperature. I had been consistently printing with the default 200 for PLA. However, it suddenly stopped laying down properly and I had to increase the temperature to 220 to get a normal print. Nothing has changed with my environment so I’m not sure what might be happening there. Is the thermistor failing? Or is this something that also requires calibration?
You might want to check at the thermistor location, maybe is moved back and doesn’t contact the head well enough.
Also, temperatures need to be tweaked for material, if you are switching between colors you might need to adjust the temp.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to tweak it just right to get enough accuracy to print a new effector. I managed to master blender just enough to change the size of the holes on their model. I can’t imagine why they printed them at 4mm for 3mm bolts. Any other delta effector model seems to have snug mounts for the arms. I thought I had it but it became clear I didn’t once I printed a large advanced calibration object and found it was still quite out of scale.
In the process of that I rechecked my assembly once more and removed some inaccuracy by loosening all the parts attached to the acrylic triangles and pressing them tightly toward the center so the bolts are forced against the same side of the holes on all sides. This made a big difference, and put the X Y and Z within .05 of each other at 60mm on the advanced calibration disc, which is very refreshing to see. The arm length remains off (likely because of the wiggle room in the effector holes) so adjusting that with the arm length offsets is the next project but I ran out of time last night.
Strangely, in the process of my latest calibration object print, I found it was no longer printing well at 220. It was having a hard time laying down the first layer and skipping spaces. Having watched some videos I decided to try tightening the extruder gear slightly and now it prints fine at 200 / 208. So maybe it was just that the extruder tension was a bit light or maybe it wiggled the screw out from vibration and that’s why it changed?
One thing I noticed, when calibrating the extruder is that the steps per mm default they use is a bit low, but interestingly about 10% low, which is just the right reduction for the recommended flow rate for printing pla. I wonder if they set them that way on purpose to print pla out of the box.
