DIY Taz Pro - The Printed Parts Project: Reducing the dependency on machined and esoteric parts
Description
Howdy. ***** IMPORTANT WARNING AND DISCLAIMER: **** If you do this wrong, or maybe even if you do this right(!), or you cheap out on the filament, or you don't get good layer adhesion, or your parts come out warped, or any of the million variables that could go wrong by using printed parts instead of machined parts? Well, if a YZ idler fails, for example, Your whole gantry could crash into the bed, breaking the glass, toolhead, possibly warping parts, and possibly causing serious injury, especially if the bed was heated. So, you know, don't do this if you don't know what the heck you're doing. You are assuming ALL risk by reviewing this material or downloading or otherwise using these files. This is an UNSUPPORTED project (meaning, I don't take questions or requests, sorry!) and it's a work in progress. Use of anything here is done so entirely at your own risk, and with the understanding that fitment may not match your use case, print settings, filament, or other variables, and may end up wasting a bunch of your time. ** Please note the DANGER / RISK warnings above! ** Want to build your own Taz Pro inspired machine from source and off-the-shelf hardware? Well, you're certainly entirely on your own there, but maybe this might help...... The Taz Pro features a lot of machined parts. That's awesome. But some of those parts are hard to come by. And with the incredible advanced engineering filaments available today, maybe one could.... work around those limitations! For example -- Can't get Lulzbot to sell you a machined YZ Idler, machined Y-ends, Machined Z-uppers, or Frame Corners? and you don't want to pay to machine your own from the source files, because, you know, you can buy a whole printer for a few hundred bucks and why would you want to waste your hard earned money on an arguably overpriced and under performing printer like the Taz lineup? Don't want to (or can't) use odd-ball rail 10mm rail cut lengths like 450mm for Z (or 701mm on the Taz Pro XT)? Just want to buy some standard rail lengths that you can get anywhere on the super cheap (maybe even importing from the cheapest of the cheapest sources?) and go, such as 400mm long rails or 700mm long rails? Have access to (or know someone who has access to) an FDP Printer that can print in very high grade engineering materials, such as Carbon or Glass Fiber Augmented Polycarbonate? Bored, got some time, and/or otherwise just want to play around with it? Ta-da. That's what this is all about. This kit will allow you to make your own YZ Idler (you must use very, very strong filament like PC-CF, and even then, it may not be enough - see warnings beow) or assemble a Lulzbot style printer using off the shelf "more common" 2020 rails that can be tapped at M6 rather than M5, and ready-to-go pre-cut lengths of rails for your Z-axis rather than using weirdo lengths that really just serve to make life difficult for those wanting to build their own DIY Lulzbot Taz Pro inspired machine. The biggest "impact" item in this project is the printable YZ idler. However, to make that part printable, some very minor dimensional compromises had to be made - the machined part is too "tight" (read: small) to start bringing posilok nuts into the equation, so this was worked around by a combination of substituting the idler bearings for a smaller size (685 instead of 625), and by offsetting impacted parts by the balance of the distance delta - which is only 2.75mm! That's why there are a lot of variations included here - variations for Z rail length of 450mm (stock), 400mm (off the shelf cut length), 701mm (stock XT), and 700mm (off the shelf cut length). To build your own YZ Idler, for **each idler** you'll need: - Some sort of extremely strong filament with high tensile strength and low flex like PC-CF - 2 x M5 Posilok Nuts (Black) - 2 x 685 bearings (685ZZ or 685RS, or even better - flanged variations of one of those) - 1 x M5 x 20mm Socket Head Cap Screw (Black) - 1 x M5 x 14mm Button Head Cap Screw (Black) - 3 x M5 Flat Washers (Black) There are also variations of parts (where needed) to enable you to use 2020 rail that seems to be far more common than whatever oddball sizing Lulzbot uses. You may note that one set of the Z-uppers is called "Lulzbot 2020 incl Twist". The Lulzbot Z-uppers are offset ever so slightly from the bottom; whether that's intentional or a mistake, I don't know for certain, but I think they were trying to 'spread the bars apart' slightly at the top to compensate for the failure of the geared steppers to be able to fully hold the weight of the Dual Titan when in power-off state. That's a pretty poor workaround, but I've included files that introduce the 'same' twist in the rails, on the off chance you happen to have the exact 2020 rail that Lulzbot uses kicking around and you want to keep it stock. If you use "more common" 2020 rail tappable at M6, that "twist" is eliminated with these designs, which may cause your toolhead to be a little less likely to "Stay put" when loaded all the way to the top. Removing the twist is, in my opinion, the "right thing to do", because I'm working on another project which I'll drop sometime in the future, and I cannot have that level of slop / bend in the design. So I removed it. YMMV, etc. Have fun. Or don't. Whatever!
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