Some time ago I posted this picture of my printer. That was the start of a complete rebuild. It is nearly finished now, and it just completed a 12 hour print. I am amazed at the difference between the old standard cartesian method and the current corexy setup. Everything works so much better. It’s faster, less noisy, more precise. The stepper motors are running just half the current they used to do.
The pictures of the red box thing show a new housing for a soldering station. It took 12 hours at 60mm/sec, PETG, 0,2mm layers.
After the first layers I noticed that the hotend couldn’t keep up, so I had to tape some paper in front of the fan-intake, and that helped.
In the past I sometimes had ugly black blobs sticking to the prints, something people familiar with PETG printing will recognize?
Turns out that the fan really helps tremendously with that.
There are still blobs coming off the hotend, but they are not burned, and just loosely lay on the surface of the print, where they are shoved off to the side by the hotend /fan shroud.
Still need to do a lot off work, but I 'm happy with the current results.
I often wonder how much of the improvement is the change in mechanism, or the improvement in your skill/knowledge.
@Mike_Miller it must be the mechanism, since I’m still an idiot.
Nah, we’re all idiots…we’re just getting less and less idiotic all the time.
@Mike_Miller You really think so. Human kind never ceases to amaze me.
Being in the market for a new job, I think the REAL issue is: The people that know shit never take enough credit and the people that don’t know shit do. 
@Mike_Miller I think what you’re describing is Dunning-Kruger effect (tl;dr: smart people think of themselves as dumb, while dumb people think they are experts):
I spent a large part of my life thinking I was of mere average intelligence. In hindsight, this was mostly because I was working with so many brilliant software engineers in my previous profession (a software engineer). I have come to realize I should give myself a little more credit–you should, too. I thought so much of this was easy enough that anyone could do it, but for most people that just doesn’t seem to be true. (I still make stupid mistakes though–see my latest post.)
@SirGeekALot this is what I have referred to as the “trained ape by comparison” mentality.
To which @Ross_Bagley said “Yeah, most really smart people think they are a trained ape compared to the “really smart” people around them. It’s a good sign.”
That was extremely well put, seeing as how he said this back in April and I haven’t forgotten.
I still think corexy performs a lot better than simple xy.
My particular cross to bear is having been made redundant at a place where everyone knew their stuff. I know I was let go as a cost savings measure as a result of a merger, but you’ve gotta wonder.
@Rien_Stouten sorry for hijacking your post! Back on topic…I have an Ultimaker-style gantry aluminum extrusion 3D printer, but I have 2 old Printrbots, the older of which I have been contemplating making into another Ultimaker-style gantry bot. Q: was your old bot similar to Ultimaker, or was it more like a Prusa? How difficult was the firmware to setup? What control board are you using? Also, I have seen those little black blobs when I print with PETG, too.
@SirGeekALot hijacking is okay, don’t worry. My old bot was just a simple xy machine, with z only moving up and down. But large, and heavy. It is still large and heavy, but the corexy setup makes everything so much easier. The firmware was, for the most part easy. I only had to change the type in marlin, and make x and y movement the same number of steps, and that was it. The setting for homing were a bit hit and miss, but after relocating the homing sensors, I was printing.
Okay, all prints were mirrored, but solved that too, eventually.
I’m using a Ramps board, with external TB6600 drivers, except for the extruder, which is driven by a 4988 . I guess I don’t need them anymore for the x and y axis, but I still need an external driver for the z axis, since I have three steppers connected to it.
The next upgrade will be a 32-bit board
Probably a mks sbase.
@Rien_Stouten that sounds good, except for the board from MKS. It turns out, they are posers when it comes to open hardware. Genuine Smoothieboard (or Azteeg?) might be a better choice, IMHO. TB6600? Whoa. Those look like beefy CNC stepper drivers. Probably overkill, but there’s nothing wrong with that!
@SirGeekALot
mks is half the price, and I am on a budget.