My Prusa i3 Plus Feb. 2016 Edition Tweaks by RalphBariz

Last crawled date: 3 years, 1 month ago

[X] references to the image/model with the number X
{U} I designed it, its available here, but its not printed and/or installed.

When I got and assembled my Prusa i3 Plus Feb. 2016 Edition, I recognized the one or other thing I thought you could make better.
The parts are designed so you could use them at assembling, but also to upgrade the assembled printer.
For sure this parts are all printed with my feb 2016 prusa.

When you build the y-axis you should keep 80mm space between the nuts on the threaded rod. Well, you can measure, fix the nuts and later in the progress its not that exact anymore. Because of that you got spacers here. You need 2 times 2 of them you connect with each other on the rod. They keep the 80mm and as long as you hear no cracking plastic and see no gap between them and the nuts you are fine. (IMPORTANT: the .stl file in the package is for 0.4mm nozzles, if you got another one, please install openscad, open the .scad file, change the "nozzle" variable on top, render it and export a new stl file. You may also need to tweak the "flapfactor" variable so your slicer generates the flap correct.) [9-11]


Marrying the portal with the y-axis is a bit tricky, because it is simply not standing :D
With the portalstand, you need two, you get something to make it stand by itself. Also even if it is not believable with this tiny plastic things, later the vibrations at printing(note the rondings for force redirection) but also the overall stability and precision is increased a lot. They may seem a bit tight at first look and you need force to place them(it may also crack a bit), but they should be very fix. [2-8]


in the tutorial they say one should push the piece of filament until the end of fan shaft. Well you cannot do that, since the hole is simply ending somewhere but not channeling to the fan shaft. This causes problems with the fan holder at printing time. Here you find a 5015housing-MK3.stl with the hole how it should be [12]. If you want to use the tweaked x-carriage I mention below, also use 5015housing-MK3-tweaked.stl [13, 15]


When the x-axis moves it may happen, that a force is applied to the printingfan. In this case the top nose of the x carriage may break. I changed the design a bit. x-carriage-tweaked.stl [14, 15] to use in combination with 5015housing-MK3-tweaked.stl [13, 15]


Whats not written in the guide, after assembly before calibrating z, since now you know everything is straight, you could do an "lcd: settings->auto home"(check the location of z-axis pushbutton before) and check the distance between the delivered, for me orange, plasticpats(see photo) with a caliper. For sure they are not equal. Just turn the nuts on the z-axis threaded rods at the top to adjust. This eases z calibration a lot... for sure only if everything is straight.


the plastic parts for calibrating z could be also tweaked by drawing quartermarks on them. maybe with numbers, so you know exactly which one is which one.

a nice stabilizer reducing the wobbling of the z axis threaded rods you can find here http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1425056