Scored four 3D Touch printers from surplus place at a really good price, but now challenge is likely swapping out controller boards and extruders/hotends.
It’s a shame cause the extruders (3 color) look nice and well built, but I can see where someone was having jamming problems cause there’s ground up filament on them.
Touch pad is cool as well, but looks like I’d lose that functionality as well.
Anyone have one of these and done mods on it to make it reliable?
I completely forgot these things existed they’re that old.
What happen ?
Too too carazyyyyyyyyy
I wonder where the other 2 3D Touch printers they made are… I wonder how many they sold?
@Bruce_Wattendorf That was beautifully brutal.
We have one of these in pur school. They bought it when 3d printing was really new, thinking they would get a edge over nearby schools… It never worked so we use it as a storage for fillaments. Now we upgraded to 5 brand new printers that actually print. Gl with ur restoration job m8
They have enormous moving mass and my understanding is that the acrylic shell is part of the structure.
Ha Ha Bruce…Well, I spent some time cleaning the printers this evening and like +Jeff DeMaagd said, the moving mass is insane. The extruder carriage with 3 hotends is massive and forget about the build plate. I have no idea what they were thinking as it’s two pieces of glass sandwiched together with some sort of high density plastic on top that collectively weighs 5 lbs.
I suspect after watching some vids the experience at the school that had these was much like what @Matthew_Del_Rosso said in that they just didn’t work very well.
But at $37.50 each, I think it’s worth the effort to swap some parts out and get them working again.
@Tim_Sills wow! $37 a pop?? I would jump on that anyday, even just for the chasis. What a steal!!
I have one of these and one of the newer CubeX designs. It’s not a lot of design to turn them into a reprap.
XYZ steppers are all fine. XY homing switches work fine. I think you’ll need a new Z homing switch, new electronics, and an extruder and hotend and wiring. If you’re designing from scratch you can laser-cut a new plate for the X carriage and then figure out how to mount a hotend. The bitsfrombytes and cube has slightly different hole placement on the X carriage though.
The acrylic frame isn’t part of the structure, it can come off with 8 screws. I leave it on.
My Cube conversion is an abomination with a bowden e3d volcano chimera dual nozzle which I don’t recommend. I print 30mm/sec with 0.6mm layers with a .8mm nozzle. I’d probably go single nozzle or otherwise direct drive if I were to do this again. I’d probably keep the oversize nozzle but maybe go down to 0.6mm
auto bed leveling is worth the trouble but I haven’t got around to making my design work with it.
@Nick_Winters , yup, everything you mentioned is what’s on the to-do in that I’m going to swap the board and go to a single hotend. I’m currently using a titan aero on my i3 knock-off and would like to use the same on these with a proximity probe for bed leveling.
6 color?
If you mount it to where the existing plate is, it’s at least 17mm too short with v6, or 8mm too short with volcano. The round parts are 40mm OD. There’s also only 42mm between the round things holding the bearings on the X carriage, so you can’t fit the titan aero in there. I guess you could take it all apart and buy new 12mm bearings to make room, and redesign X belt mounting. I think you will have to disassemble most of the frame to replace the X bearings or rails.
FWIW, this is a pretty good site on the challenges of these printers…http://matthiasm.com/touch.html .
When I first saw the printer I had wondered how the heck a brick PS could drive 3 hot ends…now I know why…geesh.
http://matthiasm.com/touch.html
