Gadgetory

my name is Chris Padgett I'm a founder of fusion 3 design where a 3d printing company based out of Greensboro North Carolina and our goal is to build a product that really enables people to take their ideas into reality quickly and easily so this is our first printer we're calling it the f 306 306 is for the build volume it's one cubic foot which is three hundred and six millimeters on a side we think it's one of the biggest build volumes of a printer in its class we put a lot of effort into the mechanical design of this printer to really make the reliability rock-solid to really make the the pre quality as high as possible and to make it as easy to use as possible so we're really after you turn it on you feed it the g-code file it works the same every time the prints look great every time and I feel like we're pretty close to that so I walk you through the mechanical design of this printer so along with the big built build volume comes the need to increase the printing speed as much as possible otherwise the prints take forever in order to increase the speed while maintaining print quality it's important to reduce the moving mass so what we've done is we use a drive system called core XY which has two motors here both of them are used to do both x and y motion so the motors are stationary they don't have to move but we still get two motors he's still two degrees of freedom along with that lower moving mass we use a Bowden extruder so the motor is mounted here and it feeds the filament through a PTFE tube in here when you scale the build volume up you also if you stick with a smooth robb design you have to scale the smooth rods up and to get a good enough stiffness you're looking at 10 or 12 millimeter rods which really starts to increase the weight and the cost quite a bit so we chose to move away from smooth rods entirely we're using a linear bearing system that rides on the aluminum extrusion itself the advantage of this is it takes out a lot of parts so we don't have to have smooth rods we don't have smooth rod brackets we just have some bearings and a one inch by one inch t slot extrusion and it gets it's very stiff the motion is very smooth that can also run at very high speeds I've run this machine up to speeds in excess of one meter per second with no issues another aspect of reducing the moving mass is we have the bed is only moves in Z it's quite a large bed it's thirteen and a half by thirteen and a half inches and that starts to weigh quite a bit so you don't want to move that around like a Mendel style so the bed moves in Z it's driven by a lead screw mounted to a motor we have some outriggers up here to help damp any of the oscillation it picks up the other thing we're doing with the x and y drive system that's pretty novel is we're using a spectra fishing line here a couple other printer designs have used this castle uses it Tantalus uses it but i think we're the first people to use it on a printer this big and we're using that to replace the timing belts this has a couple advantages it takes some cost out it also allows us to use lower line tension while still maintaining zero backlash the other nice thing is it allows us to route the drive cable through the sides of the lumen I'm here it allows us to make this turn in here inside the t-slot itself so the cable is nice and protected it's not exposed to getting caught on anything or the user hitting it on the electronic side we're using just a standard standard rambo board for multi machine it's not too much exciting there we're using Marlin for the firmware and it's all driven by a 24 volt power supply so if you're interested in more information you can visit our website at fusion 3d sign calm we are just going into our beta test now that's going to run for about two months and hopefully early fall we'll be ready to start our first production run