I have a few issues with it really. The one is sticking… and I just took a chunk out of my pad trying to remove a tiny little demo mug. The second is maybe not a problem but my lack of knowledge on the setup and that is that the print is set to the same place, off center. Is there a way to change print positioning in Cura? That position isn’t going to work for obvious reasons.
Then, I am certain I am still having issues with print quality and I have not been able to adjust things to see what changes because I can’t get things removed and the problem is compounding sticking wise. The finished print looks like fabric and is flimsy and wouldn’t hold out air, let alone water.
I am going to try again with a different roll of filament and see if maybe it is a filament issue, maybe flow, maybe feed speed…??? Kind of frustrating
Okay…that was an adventure of a not so good kind. I got some free time to mess with the printer and the good news is that I resolved a number of issues. I figured out that the offset issue was due to me not having the correct printer type set up so it thought the table was square. I had a few of the motion settings jacked up so the filament speed was too slow and it couldn’t put down enough material to get the fill right. All of that was my bad. So I decided I had enough faith in my adjustments and it was doing a good job (though still sticking like a barnacle on a ships hull) so I sliced up a print of a bunny that came off the sd card and started it running. It was doing great and with a couple more tiny tweaks, I sat in my chair and worked on other things while it whizzed away. Then came the smoke. Lots of smoke.
I would say… there were flames. Sheesk. So now I have a ticket in with the place I bought it from and we shall see how that turns out. I’ll keep you posted.
And I have half a friggen bunny. What am I supposed to do with half a friggen bunny?
Well, I am extremely impressed with the manufacturer. I bought my printer from 3D printer Bay online and I sent them a ticket for support and they already responded in less than 24 hours offering to send me the driver, a new heated bed and a stepper motor to replace the damaged parts. That is very cool. Good customer service in this day and age is difficult but these guys pulled it off without a hitch.
It actually caught fire and burned the header it was plugged into. Glad it self destructed and stopped burning cuz it would have been a heck of a fire. The printer was sitting on a wood table.
I am now mounting a temperature and smoke sensor to my bench top esp that sits above my printer.
I often leave it for a few hours on longer prints to do its thing
Wonder what caused the short? wonder if it was a badly soldered component.
Yes, a close call! I have a smoke detector inside my printer enclosure, just in case.
Do you think this is related to the print quality problems? Maybe the driver was bad right from the start, which is why the printer wasn’t extruding properly.
I don’t know if it had anything to do with the print quality but if I had to throw a wild guess, no. I changed a bunch of settings for feed speed and print speed and what not and the print was looking great. Nice and smooth and consistent. Then the driver board took a vacation. I am seriously thinking about building an enclosure now. Put the camera and the smoke detector in there. I put OctoPrint on a Pi and mounted that up on the power supply. Waiting for a buck converter to wire in to power the Pi and that will give me the hardware to add the camera and some IO’s to install some temp sensors and a communication path to MQTT for alerts should there be an issue. It has me a bit spooked.
(RANT TRIGGER ALERT) Well… I figured this needed an update. The bottom line - Don’t waste your money on a Kossel printer. You are buying an erector set with directions from Ikea and the support comes from… less than Ikea. I got it together and had a horrid time trying to get a somewhat decent print out of it. I read a shit-ton of forum posts on it and they all said the same things - The printer is fine if you change out most of the parts and put Marlin firmware on it because the firmware that Kossell uses stock, is waaaay behind the curve and buggy at best. As you have read, I finally got this turd to start printing a somewhat decent, though still not right print when it caught fire. Real promotional bell ringer there. I figured, well, give them a shot to rectify it. They did send me a new board and the driver chips and a new heated bed plate which was fine but OF COURSE, the board is raw and unflashed. I got no info on how to flash it so back to the net to slog through another shit-ton of forum posts and as before… change the board, change the hot end, flash to Marlin 2.0. I did not change the board and I did not change the bed.
I did however try to install Marlin 2.0. Watched a few YouTube videos on it as well. They all make it look super easy… click a file link, download, extract, drop in some specifically modified .H files for the Delta Plus and whack it in with the Arduino IDE. (I really wish there was a middle finger emoji). They say to use Aduino IDE 1.8.9 which I am currently running but it fails to compile. Seems to be lots of that issue going on. You also need to kind of know what the original configuration for your machine WAS so you can make sure you can set it back up that way and there is no way to do that unless you know what all was in there before. And I have no clue.
So… I paid a chunk of change for something that sin’t even big enough to hang laundry on. At least the treadmill is good for that. Just about ready to take the PS off and toss the rest in the trash. Should have spent the money on a Prusa. F@#% it… I will just buy enclosures.
That really sucks, must be a hit/miss with them. Mine does ok and after tons of fiddling in Cura I managed to get no gaps in the print (every time you do a curve it would reduce print width and you would end up with vertical gaps).
All and all I think I got lucky but things I have noticed is the vertical structure needs better bracing top and bottom to be more ridged, if you are filling a wall and it goes back and forth over 2-3 layer width it over reaches.
I think if I had to print anything pretty that I couldn’t sand back easy and primer I would need to get a better quality printer.
Crap that you had a bad experience though, I seen mixed views when I was looking to buy it and knew it could be a stab in the dark, hopefully mine keeps on keeping on, but you never know with cheap Chinese goods.
I used the same methodology for deciding whether I wanted one or not as well. I did some research and the prevailing thoughts were that it was a starter printer… good enough for basic, simple, noob projects but not good enough to do real good production level stuff. I didn’t need production level so i went with a starter machine. But it support is total crap and that i didn’t know. I figured there was a big enough following in the 3d printer world that I could afford to take the relative risk. What I didn’t know is that to make this printer do much more than make slobbery plastic messes (not to mention catch fire… mine isn’t the first to do so… thanks alot Trigorilla), you have to change the hot end, replace the board with a more robust one, put a different bed on it and brace the crap out of the rails because they are wiggly. The money involved in that is a replacement printer. At least the same cost as what was already spent. And you still have a “serviceable” but not great printer. I will either buy an Ender 3 or just save the money and buy a Prusa. OR just wait 5 more years and buy a resin printer as the cost will come down significantly since that tech is getting way better. I don’t know. Terribly frustrating though. I am not going to give up on it but it has gone way down the list of anything I give a crap about. It’s nobody’s fault but mine for buying a “starter” printer. Fisher Price
I don’t leave things well enough alone. I ALSO refuse to let inanimate objects kick my ass!
It was a long night, or should I say morning because it was very early this morning before I went to bed. I decided to see if I could find an old version of the Kossel Delta software as a working base for the Marlin updates. It took me sifting through a dozen different people’s postings of their “modded” firmware to find one that was a good base. Just so happens it was an old version of the original Kossel firmware. I was able to get that working for the most part as a good base and then added on the Marlin 2.0x bug fix version that applies specifically to the Delta. The Marlin stuff is not the complete program, as I found out awhile back. It is just major configuration updates that fixes the idiosyncrasies in the Kossel version. So you have to have a base program for this to overwrite the additions to.
Long story short, i will be creating a video of what I got and how I fixed it. I am also going to be posting both the base version and the Marlin2.0x update so it is in one place for others to use to fix theirs should that arise. I tried a test print but I need to do some work to the heated bed. The sticker would not let go of a print and I badly damaged it removing it so I tossed the sticker when I rebuilt the machine. It is just smooth aluminum at the moment and nothing sticks. That’s ok, I can work that one out. At least this POS is working now. Kind of.
I had to do a bunch of tweaking but I have definitely got the Delta known as the ‘burnpile’ doing a complete print without issue. I did this print on a draft setting so had little expectation of it being nice and smooth and I know I will need to continue to do test prints and tweak as I go. The key though is that I was able to bring it back from the dead. What a PITA!
I resolved the damaged sticker on the hot bed thing simply by using glue stick on the aluminum plate. Works like a charm and with a small amount of effort, the print pops off appropriately.
Wow, this sounds like an epic PITA and learning curve! Congrats on bashing it into a working condition, and coming up with a solution to the software mess.
