Let's build a VORON: Smaller fixes

Bed mesh offset in one corner

It got pointed out to me in the VORON forum that I my right rear Y extrusion was a bit high. The Trident has automatic bed leveling, but because the bed is only attached in three positions it can’t compensate for a difference in the rear that only has a single mount in the middle. If you’re unlucky this might cause issues with bed adhesion.

Turns out I’ve had some problems with bed adhesion. Not a lot mind you, but enough to bother me on some trickier prints. I’ve seen the offset on the corner go down to -0.26, which is more than the standard 0.2 layer height I use, so this might be the cause of some of the issues I’ve seen.

In the voron_1_trident_questions channel on the VORONDesign Discord there was a pinned message on how to adjust this. I ended up adjusting the front right Y extrusion upwards quite a bit to compensate for this.

The mesh still isn’t perfect (and it can sometimes look worse than the adjusted picture above), but it’s now a lot better and importantly the rear corners are much more level.

Bulging corners

One significant print issue I’ve had is bulging in the corners on overhangs:

Maybe it was overheating? But it happened consistently, with long layer times, with max fans, and for PLA/ABS/ASA. Another idea was over extrusion, but I think that should’ve shown up in other places?

Then I found the Bulging section in Ellis’ Print Tuning Guide that made the issue disappear. These were the changes I made:

• Enable external perimiter first
• Set overhang threshold for bridge flow to 0
• I also experimented with disabling overhangs specific settings completely (set bridge speed and fan to 0 or the disable checkbox), but I’m uncertain how effectual that was compared to the other two settings.

Some of these were specific to SuperSlicer, the slicer I use.

Extruder skipping

I had printed for around 400 hours when the extruder suddenly started skipping. At first it was just minor artifacts, but after a while prints started failing in major ways or refusing to extrude anything at all:

My first idea was that I had messed up the tension in the extruder, so it no longer got a good grip on the filament. (I had some major issues with loading filament at one time, and I started screwing around with everything I could think of.)

But alas I couldn’t solve it with a quick-fix, so I had to open up the toolhead. Which I should have done much sooner, because there were a bunch of broken filament stuck in the gears:

I really didn’t want to disassemble it because I was afraid of the effort to do so, but in the end it was just a few screws and the whole cleaning process took 10 min. Building your own printer has some benefits, I should have more faith in the process.

2mm PTFE between extruder and hotend

There were a lot of leftovers after the build; nuts, screws, belts, etc. But also an unused bag with “Teflon Tubing, 4x2mm”, which surely shouldn’t be completely unused?

Turns out you’re supposed to use a tube with an inner diameter of 2mm between the extruder and hotend, but I had used the regular PTFE tube that had an inner diameter of 3mm. This isn’t ideal and requires more retraction (which I didn’t compensate for), and it can cause stringing issues (which I had).

First layer woes

For a long time I was really happy with how my first layers looked and I could start a print and it would finish without issue most of the time.

But sometimes I had these “blobs” that started collecting:

I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. Overextrusion maybe, but i didn’t find any issues with it and this only happened in the beginning of the print.

And later on I started to get severe issues with bed adhesion where I felt lucky if a part stuck around long enough for the print to finish. The first layer started to look garbage as well:

The worst part is, I didn’t think I had changed anything.

I tried a bunch of things; changing nozzle, recalibrating PA and EM, changing filament, and even replacing the extruder (more on that in a future post) yet the issue remained.

What finally fixed it was recalibrating the z offset and tuning first layer squish once more. I’m not sure why I had to do this again (doesn’t Tap magically solve everything?), but now the first layer is pretty and the bed adhesion problems are almost completely gone. (Some prints have a tendency to warp a little, but I guess it’s hard to get things perfect.)

Handles

The kit includes some very nice handles you can install. But unfortunately they cover up the top panel so you have to remove the handles before you can remove the panel—a gigantic pain.

So I ended up printing some sturdy handles instead. They’re really large comparatively, but they get the job done. I haven’t had that much use for them yet, but I felt obliged installing them since some kind of handles came with the kit.

LED mounts

There were no instructions on how to install the LEDs, so I taped them on top of the included extrusions covers. Turns out you were supposed to print a bunch of LED mounts to get the LEDs pointing inwards towards the print for better lighting:

Longer spool holder

I ran into the surprising issue that some spools were too wide for the stock spool holder (3DJake’s filament for example). So I replaced it with a longer one.

In the future I should probably replace it with a top mounted spool holder, but I got lazy when I saw I didn’t have the required M5 hardware. Maybe another day.

Bowden tube routing

I had some issues with the bowden tube getting stuck behind or under the cable chain, so I tried the bowden tube guide to keep it away. It was difficult to find a route that worked well. Depending on the mount position it had a tendency to cause a bend in the tube that drastically increased the friction on the filament, which I suspect was the cause for some prints failing.

I also use the Trident noodle that’s made to prevent the tube from colliding with the roof of the printer, and this combination works very well.

Display mount

The display mounts I got from the print-it-forward service wasn’t compatible with the screen I got, so I had to hold it together with tape.

So I tried to find the proper parts to print, but I must be missing something because the screw holes to hold the display cover still don’t line up. I don’t care to spend more energy on this; it’s a bit weird but tape does the job well enough.

At least I got the display cover in an accent color.

Improved seal in extrusions

Despite having the Nevermore filter and a HEPA filter exhaust, I could very clearly smell ABS fumes from the printer. Looking at the extrusions, there were large holes in the blind joints and I suspect that doesn’t help.

Therefore I tried to cover up the holes with some Sugru. It’s better, but I should probably replace the front door too.