Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Fine Tuning the Rostock ...Success!!

I spent this long weekend resolving some issues on the Rostock.
Two issues that were causing intermittent problems were:
  1. The Teflon tube on the bowden occassionally working its way loose during a print.  
    This was a pain. If I tightened the clamp up too tight it would crimp the tube and restrict the path of the plastic filament. I tried a few things like filing the outside of the tube to provide more grip, adding some tape, etc.
    Finally I had a eureka moment when I suddenly woke up at 3am Saturday moning. I Then couldnt sleep, so I got up to try and implement the idea. I added a threaded nut onto the Teflon tube and redid the connection so the night is locked inside and cannot pull out. Success
      
  2. The extruder sometimes skipped when feeding filament during parts of the print that involved laying alot of plastic quickly. Basically did not have enough torque. I redesigned the gears shrinking the drive gear a little and increasing the size of the secondary gear to increase torque. 
Basically this resulted in the quality of my prints going from this:
 
To this..


 
This last print was at .2mm layer height abd too about 4 hours. I had to vary the speed at certain points to allow the filament to dry on the smaller diameter parts
 

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