So a while back I acquired one of the large Kaly modular enclosures. After seeing how much @SeanHacker Loves Dick, I went on the adventure/nightmare/wild goose chase of printing TPU. I have a Creality Ender 3. I have to say for the money I have been quite pleased with this printer. I was still running the Bowden tube set up though. I tried various ways of printing TPU with that (none successfully) until my hotend had a melt down. So I decided to rebuild the whole thing from the board up basically.
I upgraded my board to a SKR mini. With that came a whole rabbit hole in its own. After learning a little bit about C++ I configured my own custom firmware for the new board along with a bl touch and direct extruder. Unfortunately because my hotend went out I wasn’t able to print any mounts for my new parts… so I went custom fab with it . My whole goal was to get the printer printing well enough to be able to print some mounts/covers for all the new stuff…
After weeks of learning and tinkering and experiments, I finally have printed my first somewhat decent TPU gasket. I still have some fine tuning to do in the slicer and firmware but his damn this one felt good… I was starting to think I would never get here ha. I call it “Frank Ends Reality” because it’s a Frankenstein ender 3 from Creality… and Fuckin Frank… Now that I have a functioning printer again I can finally learn fusion360 so I can design some mounts for my fans, extruder, bl touch and such. It works!!! Now it’s time to refine and beautify my creation. All of the upgrades were done for about 50 bucks… Board, Bl touch, Extruder, Fans and Gantry Plate. .
@SeanHacker Are your humps in your gaskets a little to small for the enclosure? What infill did you use? I also think I got a pretty cheap roll of tpu…
I think I’m somewhere around 415 e-steps or something. I have a different e-step count for different filaments though. I use the scripts section in Simplify3D to set it.
Ok cool… I finally got it working … it just seemed like a lot. Watched like 12 YouTube videos on it and not one of them mentioned that you would have to increase your esteps by 4x
Yep exactly, you are getting ALOT of extra torque with that extruder.
The only advice I can give you is to NEVER let your filament run out, in the clone i have, if this happens the filament gets stuck inside the extruder and you have to take the entire thing apart to get a new roll fed through it.
I’m getting there… it’s a learning process for sure… but soon I’ll be able to teach about it. Still need to order a pancake stepper to reduce weight on the gantry. Also still have to get a bigger bolt and a nice spacer to zip tie my wires to.
Sooooo. Hey guys, and gals, and non binaries. And zeees and feees, gorillas and apes… how ever you see yourself, I just wanted to give an update I. Did a thing. It turns out Frank doesn’t end much… mostly hot air. However since this was one of my beginner threads. I decided to keep it alive. Fuckin sue me.
It’s still not completely done… I’m having problems getting my bed to heat but usually when I get in from the shop I’m too tired to go back out to the shop for the multimeter I forgot., this has been sitting for a minute. It will likely need a new board to function properly but I will have it done in a couple days…. Leaps and bounds, right? Like we are on the moon.
. My whole goal was to get the printer printing well enough to be able to print some mounts/covers for all the new stuff…
Fuckin sue me.