I got a bug in my drawers to upgrade my printers to full linear… I print so much I keep wearing out the bearing wheels and have to replace them more regularly than I care for.
I’ve been working on and testing this design, and am very happy with is so far. I’m cranking out prints at 150mm/s with the stock hotend. I have a new heat brake and block to install that should get me up to 250mm/s.
I’ll be redesigning the parts once more before I release, but this should be a full retrofit that reuses most of the original parts, and preserves the original part offsets so you don’t lose any build area space. The final design will be a lot cleaner and more refined than blocky test parts. I’ll be designing and releasing my own hotend cooling system as well that will incorporate a second 5015 blower for parts cooling.
More to follow!
Curious what symptoms you have when the wheels start wearing out? I’ve got quite a few hours on my printer and haven’t touched the wheels after replacing them when it was new because of shipping damage. Never even considered that they could wear out (apart from the bearings).
The wheel surfaces themselves tend to wear out and cause eventual slop due to being soft material. This is most evident in the Y axis which not only travels in a different orientation than X and Z, but also bears a lot of weight. This of course causes intermittent sag in Y. I’ve gone through several sets of bed wheels between 3 E3P’s so far. I’m converting them all to linear to reduce the amount of maintenance and increase precision and accuracy.
Slop in wheels usually manifests as what one diagnoses as intermittent underextrusion or a funky extruder drive that might be skipping. It technically is underextrusion, but it’s not because the printer is out of calibration, it’s because a section of the bed now has variable Z due to an issue in Y that is usually overlooked.
I’m really pleased with the print quality coming out of the proto, and I haven’t even swapped in the upgrade hotend yet.
I’ve also made a bunch of structural and aesthetic improvements to minimize print struggles with the proto parts, increase strength, tweaked a few things, and added a few nice-to-haves.