Self sourced 2.4 - Modified frame

[Maas101]

I've had a printer for 10+ years. It started life as an Anet A8 and over the years has had the full frankenstein treatment, like a vintage car if something breaks you bodge it with 'something that works' and keep going. Recently though my titan extruder gave up the ghost along with a few other parts and I finally decided enough was enough, I'll build a new printer. TBH I looked at Vorons years ago but decided they were too expensive to build, the Rolls Royce of DIY printers. When it came to deciding what to build I didn't even consider them. After doing nowhere near enough research other than I wanted a core XY rather then a bed slinger I decided to build a BLV MGN cube. I started sourcing the components and bought the required extrusion to build the frame, next was to find a decent hotbed. I knew I wanted cast aluminium at least 5mm thick at least 310 x310mm. living in the UK something like that was surprisingly difficult to find. I could get the aluminium but would have to machine out for the mounting holes and thermistor and would have to find a similar sized 220v bed heater and some sort of magnetic fixing for a spring steel build plate. Adding it all up the costs were way more than I wanted to pay. I then found I could buy a Voron 2.4 350 mm plate including heater magnetic mounting and build surface for a lot less. I started looking into whether I could fit it into the MGN frame and at this point the light clicked on, I'm not too far into the build to change direction why don't I just build a Voron 2.4? The plate was ordered and I started looking into how much of the already bought extrusion I could use. The BLV uses a lot of 2040 and rather than waste it I wondered if I could mod the Voron frame to use it and add a bunch of stiffness at the same time. As a result I've come up with this:



The front 2020 extrusions are made 40mm longer so the external dimensions are 40mm taller than standard and 20mm deeper than standard but all the internal dimensions / clearances remain exactly the same so I shouldn't have to modify any other components. If anyone knows why this wouldn't work please let me know but I can't see why not.

The poor old frankenstein A8 has been resurrected one more time and is now busy printing parts :



This is not a Voron!


This is a Vorlon!

Thanks for reading, will update when I've bashed the frame together which may be a while as the wifey has a list of jobs for me atm

 

[Maas101]

This weekend I managed to get some time to cut down the rails for the frame and start some assembly.


Trued up the frame is absolutely square corner to corner to the limit that I can measure. The 2040 rails seem to add a huge amount of rigidity and TBH although the change was dictated by pivoting from a different printer design I'd probably choose this over 2020 all round. Those with sharp eyes may have noticed another issue that I need to work around. The rails are v-slot not t-slot. 2020 t slot is actually pretty hard to get hold of cut to length around here, most either want v-slot for gantry or don't care. It becomes an issue seating MGN9 rails though and I already have a number of MGN12H that I don't want to waste. As far as I can tell from studying the CAD the only clearance issues caused by the carriages overhanging the rail sides are with the enclosure sides and I'm confident that I can design and print some side pieces that will give the extra 3.5 mm clearance. I'm not sure how much benefit there is in having the beefier linear slides but with the beefed up frame it can't hurt.

The poor old frankenA8tor has been whirring away almost 24/7 for the past week. She's old, she's slow and she sure a hell ain't pretty but she can churn out a halfway decent print even in ABS without an enclosure.


The stealthburner has been printed and assembled while I wait for other parts to arrive. I'm not entirely happy with the print quality of the front cover but it will do until the printer is up and running and I can print again with hopefully a better printer.



I can't do much more with that until the tool board which is currently on a slow boat from China arrives. One of the downsides to self sourcing is waiting for all the bits to arrive. The upside is it forces me to take it slowly and really think about the design. I'm consistently blown away by the quality of the design and documentation for this thing. Huge kudos to the Voron design team it really is a work of art!

As usual thanks for reading, will update when a few more bits arrive.