Thursday, October 8, 2015

Printrbot Simple Metal Upgrades

Cinderella is almost ready for the ball!
After months and months spent trying to get consistent results with ABS, I've finally started having repeatable successes. So, of course I go out and buy a full set of upgrades so I can start the calibration process all over again!

I recently bought one of those official Raspberry Pi 7" touchscreen LCDs, and I was pretty disappointed that I couldn't just print the case model that MCM made available. (That and one of the models from a recent "mostly" 3d-printable printer design was too big for my X envelope by 10mm!) So, of course when I saw the new Simple Metal upgrades in the printrbot shop, I jumped on them. (Treat yoself!)
She's now decked out with the Z and X upgrades, making her build envelope 250x150x250mm, (up from the stock 150mm3). I bought the matching new heatbed, as well, because the one I have is tuned perfectly and I want to just transplant it onto a new printer.
I also bought the new Ubis 13 hotend, because I've been wanting to print nylon, and it needs more than 240C, which is supposedly the limit of the original Ubis. Of course I had to buy a full set of spare tips to go with it, which cost as much as the stupid hoUbis itself!
To round it off, I bought a new Printrboard (rev F5) because I popped the stupid cooling fan Mosfet on mine. I should be able to fix it, but I'm not going to attempt SMD rework on a mission-critical component. It's not a huge deal, but a lot of the success I've been having with ABS is due to quickly cooling the upper layers, and the busted fan control requires me to wait around for the first couple layers to print before manually plugging in the fan. Which is annoying for 150mm2,  but will probably become excruciating for 150x250mm.
Anyway, the assembly was straight-forward. I put the original together from a kit, and added the heatbed upgrade, as well, so by now I'm quite familiar with this Disney princess.

Maybe I'll write some "first impression" posts on each upgrade, independently.