When you want to build a large format 3D printer, you can’t just scale up the design of a desktop machine. In an excellent four-part build series (videos after the break), [Dr. D-Flo] takes us through all the engineering challenges he had to contend with when building a 3D printer with a 4x4x4 ft (1.2 m cube) print volume.
For such a large print volume you won’t be printing with a 0.4 mm nozzle. The heart of the printer is a commercial Massive Dimension MDPH2 pellet extruder, capable of extruding ~1 kg of plastic per hour through 1.5 mm to 5 mm nozzles. To feed the extruder, [Dr. D-Flo] used a Venturi vacuum system to periodically suck pellets from a large hopper. The system is driven by compressed air, which can introduce moisture back into the carefully dried pellets. To reduce the humidity levels, the compressed air passes through a series of vertical aluminum tubes to allow moisture to condense and drain out the bottom.
At 8.4 kg, it needs a powerful motion platform to move it. [Dr. D-Flo] went with a stationary bed design, with the extruder pushed around by seven high torque NEMA23 motors on a large gantry built from C-beam aluminum extrusions. A machine this size needs to be very rigid with well-fitting parts, so [Dr. D-Flo] made heavy use of CNC machined aluminum parts.
To allow dynamic bed leveling, [Dr. D-Flow] made use of a Quad Gantry Leveling (GQL) scheme. This means that each of the four Z-actuators will dynamically adjust its position based on inputs from ..
Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.
