Printrbot Big-E ready for bare bones kit sales… For the 3D printing / expert / trail-blazer.
Make it as big or small as you want. For sale soon. The box will be quite small, so shipping internationally is easy. You buy your own extrusion and ATX. You extend your own wiring.
-Brook
I NEED DIS
Any idea on price yet?
Sweet!
+10 for pellet extruder, you can buy a lot of PLA pellets for very cheap. @Richard_Horne created a RepRap pellet extruder a year or so ago.
How does the bed levelling work?
Ha! ‘For the crazies that want to go big!’
We really do need bigger flow, bigger nozzles and pellet / recycled / waste extrusion for systems like this - this looks like a great kit to experiment with. I’m also a big fan of the gantry based systems, you can do a lot with them. This will be fun to watch.
Also because of the issues with pellet extruders (they can all be solved) I did a lot more work on bigger paste based systems for machines like this - it’s easier to control. Still, I need to get back onto the V3 pellet extruder this year…
I guess another option would be to use an off the shelf solution like an existing filament creator like Filastruder that would sit off to the side of the printer and just make enough filament for it use at that time although this sounds a bit fiddly and they would probably need to talk to each other so that the printer didn’t run out of filament.
Rigidity important.
@john_cummings I think you’d need some kind of buffer loop(s). The filabot folks used to have a cute arrangement where the takeup spool would turn a little bit every time the sage from extruder to reel reached a preset point.
Yes Brook and @Richard_Horne we need the E with a “big” extruder for recyled / waste plastic ! Can’t wait to get one for our school !!!
I am already working with Filabot- he gets my first kit in trade for a Filabot ;). We are discussing 5mm extrusion and a big extruder to keep things simple. I think just feeding it large diameter filament that you make yourself is a good first step. While we figure out a pellet extruder.
Multiple zones aren’t a problem.
Out heater cores are custom made by us (Carl & his team). Hand wound nichrome wire wraps around an aluminum core. The heat is very close to the threaded brass and, thus, the plastic. I have a dual core, 24v (two (12v cores in series) 13s with a longer melt zone now… Testing on the Big-E. It works like a charm but may benefit from running the first core on the bed heater at a different temp at 12v and running the bottom core on the hotend heater at 12v. I do think different temps will improve it… At least two thermistors will help as the current set up has some wander between the two cores. It’s currently only taking the temp on the bottom one.
I can see creating a flat build surface will be a challenge. Perhaps incorporating a metallic strip over (glass?) a flat enough plate, with a grid measurement for warpage compensation?
A proportionally high amount of the envelope cost will be in making sure that first layer is laid down adequately.
@Brook_Drumm
So glad you’re working with Filabot, this seems like a really great solution. Will definitely get one for myself when they are available in Europe. It will be super fun to order 25kg sacks of PLA and not be precious about printing costs.
I’ll ship the kit anywhere- it’s a small box. I know shipping is ridiculous though. I am leaving out the large, easily sourced parts to keep cost down. The downside is it will leave a lot of decisions and work for these beta test buyers to work out for themselves.
@Brook_Drumm
Does it make sense to run the first heater band somewhere around the glass transition temp of whatever you’re extruding, or is that way overthinking the issue? Also, if you’re doing a really big extruder, does it start making sense for the interior not to be perfectly round, and the nozzle ditto? (If you could extrude a ribbon and add another axis, for example…)
Haven’t thought much about nozzle shape… I wonder what the slicer would do with that? Seems like round is most straight forward.
I wonder how big you could go with this…