Voron 0.1

This project was to build a small 3D printer capable of printing ABS. I wanted it to be able to print gears and competent mechanisms out of Nylon and ABS. This became this machine's staple and continues to produce parts reliably and within tolerance. As long as it fits on the bed, the part will work.

Fabrication/Prototyping

The Voron series is extremely dependent on 3D printing most of the printer's components. Therefore, it was designed to be ABS for every printer part. Looking at the printer's parts, I started experimenting with different materials to achieve a more desirable effect.

Experimentation

The parts that became machined and tested with different materials was the hotend mount. The extruder mounting, as shown below, was initially designed to be made out of abs. Still, due to its inadequate airflow and the extruder's temperature, the hotend will melt the surrounding material. So, due to its near-impossible shape to machine out of metal without wasting too many resources, I made it out of Formlabs high temp resin.

Results

This proved to be highly effective at increasing the life of the extruder by a theoretical infinite as the abs extruder lasted only 150 print hours. At the same time, the formlabs head has yet to fail during normal operations.

During extreme high acceleration printing of accelerations of 15000mm/s^2 and print speeds of 500mm/s, the extruder cracked and caused catastrophic failure—the regular operation of the printer archives prints speeds of 500mm/s with 6000 mm/s^2 of acceleration. I noticed a rapid decrease in performance at 9500mm/s^2. The design's thin walls would deflect more until, at 15000mm/s^2, the printer heat cracked and flew off the print head. The next attempt will be with nylon 12 glass filled.

The photo below was taken while repairs were happening. If you look near the fan at the top of the image, you can see a crack line on the top of the part. It is currently being held on with glue and a fan.

Electronic/Firmware

This project requires a large amount of wire management. Being able to route the wires in a way that is both organized and effective was the most significant part of the Voron 0.1 and Trident. The second most challenging part was to figure out how to remote access the Raspberry Pi to configure Klipper for the first time. I created custom homing commands and macros to serve my purposes better after the first attempt and made auto bed leveling and brush cleaning attachments for my printers. Ultimately, it comes down to setting up Gcode to do what is needed for the printer. is needed for the printer.

Voron Trident

Experiementation

Similar to the Voron 0.1, I am testing how different plastic affects print quality and temperature resistance. We replaced a more optimized part from the previous iteration in this case. This version is designed with air channels to direct the airflow to the heatsink instead of just blowing air in a space. This new design feature removed the part from melting with ABS, but we were now testing print quality and consistency.

Results

To test this, we print large cubes and measure the surface variation of each part. I did ten samples with the ABS and Nylon Parts, and the results were surprising. The Nylon 12 SLS part was extremely stiff and had less surface variation than the ABS part. However, the Nylon part under extreme heating test did outperform the ABS part. This makes me believe the next iteration of the experiment should be Glass filled with Nylon 12.

Just a Timelapse