A treadmill-style bed can be a great addition to a 3D printer. It allows prints to be shifted out of the build volume as printing continues, greatly increasing the size and flexibility of what you can print. But [Ivan Miranda] and [Jón Schone] had a question. Instead of making a treadmill to suit a 3D printer, what if you just built a 3D printer on top of a full-size treadmill?
The duo sourced a piece of real gym equipment for this build. They then set about building a large-scale 3D printer on top of this platform. The linear rails were first mounted on to the treadmill’s frame, followed by a gantry for the print head itself and mounts for the necessary stepper motors. The printer also gained a custom extra-large extruder to ensure a satisfactory print speed that was suitable for the scale of the machine. From there, it was largely a case of fitting modules and running cables to complete the printer.
Soon enough, the machine was printing hot plastic on the treadmill surface, thereby greatly expanding the usable print volume. It’s a little tricky to wrap your head around at first, but when you see it in action, it’s easy to see the utility of a build like this, particularly at large scale. [Ivan] demonstrated this by printing a massive girder over two meters long.
We started seeing attempts at building a belt-equipped “infinite build volume” printer back in 2017, and it took awhile before the concept matured enough to be practical. Even today, they remain fairly uncommon.
So unnecessary. I love it. :D
Should be 2 videos shown up there.
That’s cool and all, but when will I be able to buy (or build) NAK3D Design’s White Knight infinite-“Z”-axis printer with [Ben Wang]’s PCB linear actuators?!
https://github.com/NAK3DDesigns/White-Knight
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/10/a-linear-actuator-entirely-in-one-pcb/
Inquiring minds want to know!!!!1
All I could think of was a giant red LEGO beam and some smaller pieces to make a giant 4- or 6-wide human sized vehicle
Nema 17 are enough for this application.. they could run up to 1500rpm, so he needs only to design a proper Gear reduction. i did it with my 100kg telescope and It rotates 8°/s with 630:1 reduction( nema rotating at 800rpm).. with professional scope precision.. a good nema 17 do 400step degree, that Is a precision of 0.9° without using any microstep.. with a Gear reduction of 630:1 the precision reach 0,0014°.. then you can have even more torch using a proper stepper driver that can supply more voltage to the stepper, like 48v. Like the tcm5160.
So it’s a waste of Money( and a big loss in precision) tò use steppers above nema 17 tò run them at very low rpm.