Kossel Tri-Fan Groove Effector by DigitalSynergy

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

I bought a Sintron Kossel Kit off ebay and the push rods fish eye joints were way too large for the supplied effector plate, limiting my print radius to around 100mm and causing binding on anything larger. Fortunately that was big enough to print AndreaDV's Groove Effector plate, after hooking it up and printing a benchy, not only did I get the best result I'd seen yet plus a much larger print radius, I noticed that the side with the fan looked much better than the side without the fan, so I designed a tri-fan version for equilateral cooling. It provides a lot of cooling power, so you have to step down the fan speed a bit, I run mine at 155 and it wont get much hotter than ABS temps, but the prints look smooth and clean.
The groove effector plate is designed so that you can easily remove your print head, but also re-designs the Z probing mechanism for auto bed leveling by using the print head itself to lift itself out of a groove which triggers the z probe. You have to make sure that the printed parts fit and slide smoothly. It seems to be better than the allen wrench style z-probe design since you don't have to worry about manual probe deployment and retraction or offset measurements. After much use and testing it myself, I can say that it works really well, especially if you sand down the parts, use some lube for the top plate and a bit of electrical tape around the print head mounted between the top plates to snug it in and minimize any head shifting from fast print speeds or from the print head hitting curling edges of printed filament and the like. I still often use a combination of the auto level system and the manual adjustment system I designed, to make corrections on the fly, it uses high tension heat resistant springs and 3d printed thumb screws on the print bed mount points: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2092046