Although no longer so common as during the heyday of the RepRap movement, it’s easier than ever to build your own largely-printed 3D printer, with designs such as Voron’s delivering excellent quality. Nevertheless, there are still niches to be filled by new designs, such as [Alex Yu]’s mostly-printed Encore design.
The Encore uses CoreXY kinematics and linear rails for the X and Y axes. Its has no internal frame; the linear rails are mounted directly to the side panels, which were printed but provided sufficient rigidity. The printer is modular, and all the parts are designed to fit within a 225 mm print bed. The Encore itself uses a 120 mm bed, a Bowden extruder, and a lightweight Bambu-style hotend. The drive motors are NEMA 17 stepper motors, and they use sliding mounts for belt tensioning. The power supply sits behind the rods supporting the Z axis, and the controller board is in the base of the printer.
Building the printer was simple; tuning it, less so. The combination of a Bambu-type hotend with a Bowden extruder created some complications, and the hotend initially received too little cooling. [Alex] solved the cooling issues by using a stronger fan on the hotend, redesigning the ventilation shroud, and adding two inward-blowing fans along the sides of the build volume. After correcting some issues with Z-axis stability, the Encore produced some quite good-looking parts. [Alex] is still improving and documenting some aspects of the printer, but he’s uploaded his progress so far to GitHub.
We’ve seen some mostly-printed printers before, including a high-speed printer, one which printed all structural components, and one which was entirely 3D printed.
Thanks to [DJBiohazard] for the tip!
I can relate to this sort of project. Building your own 3D printer for fun is deeply satisfying and similar to building your own keyboard or, dare I say it, building your own lightsaber.
This also reminds me of the good old RepRap days :)
yuck. reprap was 3d printed brackets holding together beams made out of a more reasonable structural product. 3d printing a big box is using the material for its weaknesses.
On the other hand, if you think you might want to build a big printer and haven’t built a printer from scratch, this looks like a pretty good starter project.
Haven’t watched or really even skimmed the git yet, but its certainly plausible to be using the methodology’s strengths enough it completely outweighs the materials limitations, at least for the right user.
Complex geometry being properly integrated into the structure of the box at the right location (within a fairly small tolerance) leaving only the deliberately designed to be adjusted points with any degrees of freedom could be a great thing for assembly and working on it. As anybody who has used extrusion or folded sheet parts knows its often a pain getting all the parts in the right place enough to tighten the assembly, and sometimes you just can’t get them to stay there either.
Obviously being a FDM thermo-plastic construction without some cunning cooling inside the walls of the box it wont’ be able to print with the hotter more engineering filaments but still a good enough printer for many, and quite likely better for them than buying into the Bamboo machines with all their hidden software/company problems!
One of the fastest, most capable FDM printers in the world uses an entirely 3D-printed frame:
https://github.com/MSzturc/T250
You know what you have to do next right? Print another printer with your printer
If anybody is interested in tiny CoreXY printers, here is another one https://github.com/ThatGuyHes/CUBIRON/ – i actually build it with custom mod for heated bed, used prusa xl heated bed tile for that (print size is the same as original, just did some small edits to fit it in) – it’s just a joke printer, but fun to build and print quality is not bad (not great either)