Building my Prusa MK3 (3D Printer)
Earlier this year I returned from the World Cup in Russia to find my new 3D printer, the Prusa MK 3 kit waiting for me to build.
Lucky for me I had four days till I had to go back to work and I was struggling with some serious jelag.
I spent two nights tinkering from Midnight till 8am for a total of around 16 hours to put this thing together.
Here is finished printer doing some calibration prints after having just downloaded the latest firmware.
The box!
Opened the box to find the manuals and the trademark gummy bears which buffed me during the process.
All the parts were split into bags which were labelled clearly and easy to identify combined with reading through the manual.
The axis motors.
Mad tinkering ensued throughout the night.
Assembling the extruder and then doing the cable management was the hardest part.
The scariest moment was turning it on, yes it worked! Here's a picture of the ruined lighthouse i began printing after calibration. I didn't get my first layer right and you can see the corner on the left starting to raise from the heat bed. This print eventually failed because it detached..
I'll be posting more about my various prints which have mostly been terrain pieces for tabletop gaming in the coming days/weeks. Hope you all enjoyed these pics.
Please upvote and Follow if you enjoy my posts.
I'm also happy to answer any questions in the comments section below!
Take Care.
~James
It sucks when you get that far through a print and it lifts off, it must have taken quite a few hours to print that lighthouse.
I've got a few 3d printers and I've had lots of prints do similar things after printing for hours. I got an ultra base and that helped a lot. Some things just need to be printed with a raft or a brim to get good adhesion though.
A brim normally has a radius which helps to reduce cooling contaction/stresses on sharp corners (to a certain extent). The skirt you used doesn't help much and just purges the old crap out of the nozzle before the print starts.
If an object has a sharp corner it will be much more likely to contract at that point and cause the job to curl and lift off, so designing things without sharp corners can help too.
What are you slicing your models with ?
I'm using prusa slic3r and prusa control.
I experimented with using a brim and even cleaning the bed with special cleaners. The thing that worked best for me was to simply squish the first layer by adjusting (lowering) the Z axis. Had no problems after that.
I went through so much trouble trying to get the first layer to stick, it was a nightmare. Every time I'd solve it and fix the problem it would work for a while and then start to come unstuck again. There's just so many variables that come into play - different ambient temps, different filaments etc etc. The ultrabase solved most of my problems and like you I found a lower first layer helps too.
I don't use mine much now, I was inhaling a lot of plastic fumes and even though I had it set up in a spare room with an octoprint (best thing I ever got for the printer) I was still smelling and tasting the plastic for up to a week after printing. They say PLA is harmless and it's not an offensive smell but I'm not convinced that it's as harmless as they make out. I'm in the process of building an enclosure for mine so I can print some higher temp materials which I'll do in the shed so there's no fumes in the house.
Sounds like a plan, so what kind of things have you printed? Also do you design your own prints or just get things from thingiverse and the like?
I've made a lot of things from kids toys to puzzles and quite a few mechanical prototypes. I've made a few nozzles for garden hoses and other nick nacks too.
I started out mostly printing models from thingiverse then I designed a few things with Tinkercad and modified a few models from thingiverse with tinkercad. I found Tinkercad was very easy to use but it is quite limited as far as CAD software goes, so I stated an account with Onshape which is a fully fledged CAD system that is browser based and cross platform.
Sounds interesting, I'll have to check out some of this software if i ever start doing some designs.
@drmake I finally got around to posting about this, better late than never :)
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