It’s alive! Finally finished piecing together all the parts for my second printer based on the Prusa i3 Rework. One thing to note though, be careful if you port the firmware from your 3 year old frankenstein of a Prusa v2 because I had forgotten all the hacks I had to make to keep it working.
Other than that though the very first print came out pretty dang nice as you can see from my friend rocking out in the pics. I made a couple custom x and y endstop holders since I didn’t like what was out there I’ll toss up on thingiverse and youmagine later. The power supply is only 300 watt so the bed takes a bit to heat up but that could also be due to it not being in an enclosure yet. The belts had to be tightened up a bit after the first run and it’s all ready to start paying itself back.
Oh and one more thing, the motors I got off a Massdrop a while back were all pre-wired wrong for use on the Ramps 1.4, that was annoying. Thinking about getting a different hotend mount later that I can use a cable chain with to clean things up a bit more. This works for now though.
From what I’ve seen printing straight on aluminum still requires slurry and the like and I really like that I can just print over and over again without prepping the bed. It’s not cheap (almost $10 a sheet) but it’s well worth it when I’m selling a lot of prints and don’t have to worry about adhesion problems. When I’ve got a lot of orders going or have been doing a lot of prototyping I’ll go through 1 or 2 sheets a month on one printer. Now that I have two they should last a little longer.
Yes I do that already once they start to wear out but after a while even that is not enough and since my printers main job is products I sell I like to keep the prints as good as I can with nice flat bottoms and zero curl.
I’m running an MK3 aluminum heat bed and added PEI to it a few weeks ago for about$17. It’s totally reusable and doesn’t require any extra adhesive. I print both PLA and ABS on it. Might be cheaper in the long run.
