Mike,
An update for you, There's another one coming up soon in Ireland, I've got pretty much all of the parts now, the only thing left to do is to build it, and that's going to happen just as soon as I get my garage back to sanity, I want the floor space so that I don't keep falling over the thing. My plan for the bed is to use a piece of heavy aluminium plate, with a heat barrier on top of it, then a heater, with glass above that, held on to the aluminium by retainer clips at the edge. I will be using 3 mount points for the base plate rather than 4, that way, I avoid any issues with twisting of the plate when adjusting things.
I will also be using an E3d hot end, using bowden to connect it, apart from that, it will be very much to the design published. I may make it a bit taller, just to have the flexibility to experiment with other things.
I may partly enclose the frame with some ply, partly to give me the ability to retain heat in the print area, and partly to give even more rigidity to the tower, but that's for a bit further down the line.
For power, I got lucky, E-bay had some very high power Dell server power supplies, they are rated at 12 V 120 (yes one hundred and twenty) amps, I got 2 of them for under £20 each, and another £5 got me the interface card that goes in the server, so connecting them means I don't have to butcher the connectors at all, I can do all the wiring on the interface board. Means I can have very high power heated beds, or hot wire, or even a very high power router motor at a later stage, if I get really pushed, 24 V at 120 amps would be enough to arc weld with if I want to
I would be very interested in what you've done on the bed levelling side, and some details of how you're doing with Marlin, and at some stage, I'm going to beg for a copy of your parameters for Marlin, as that will for sure save me some pain in an area that I will readily admit to not fully understanding yet. I got my printed parts from a company in London, and while I've not assembled them yet, the quality looks very good indeed, and I'm very much looking forward to getting things up and running, with a longer term plan to use a large piece of what was the floor of a flight simulator (it's a substantial frame made of a lot of 2 x 1 box steel section with an 18mm OSB floor on it, and that's going to end up as the bed of a multi function machine, the plan being to be able to do things like hot wire cutting, and also larger printing, probably using a corexy concept, where the print head will be elevated above the bed, which will remain static, as it will be way too heavy to drive with steppers, and a corexy from aluminium section with steel rails for the movement bearings, probably based on your design, but that's for experimenting once the Delta Pi is up and running.
Cheers
Steve
An update for you, There's another one coming up soon in Ireland, I've got pretty much all of the parts now, the only thing left to do is to build it, and that's going to happen just as soon as I get my garage back to sanity, I want the floor space so that I don't keep falling over the thing. My plan for the bed is to use a piece of heavy aluminium plate, with a heat barrier on top of it, then a heater, with glass above that, held on to the aluminium by retainer clips at the edge. I will be using 3 mount points for the base plate rather than 4, that way, I avoid any issues with twisting of the plate when adjusting things.
I will also be using an E3d hot end, using bowden to connect it, apart from that, it will be very much to the design published. I may make it a bit taller, just to have the flexibility to experiment with other things.
I may partly enclose the frame with some ply, partly to give me the ability to retain heat in the print area, and partly to give even more rigidity to the tower, but that's for a bit further down the line.
For power, I got lucky, E-bay had some very high power Dell server power supplies, they are rated at 12 V 120 (yes one hundred and twenty) amps, I got 2 of them for under £20 each, and another £5 got me the interface card that goes in the server, so connecting them means I don't have to butcher the connectors at all, I can do all the wiring on the interface board. Means I can have very high power heated beds, or hot wire, or even a very high power router motor at a later stage, if I get really pushed, 24 V at 120 amps would be enough to arc weld with if I want to
I would be very interested in what you've done on the bed levelling side, and some details of how you're doing with Marlin, and at some stage, I'm going to beg for a copy of your parameters for Marlin, as that will for sure save me some pain in an area that I will readily admit to not fully understanding yet. I got my printed parts from a company in London, and while I've not assembled them yet, the quality looks very good indeed, and I'm very much looking forward to getting things up and running, with a longer term plan to use a large piece of what was the floor of a flight simulator (it's a substantial frame made of a lot of 2 x 1 box steel section with an 18mm OSB floor on it, and that's going to end up as the bed of a multi function machine, the plan being to be able to do things like hot wire cutting, and also larger printing, probably using a corexy concept, where the print head will be elevated above the bed, which will remain static, as it will be way too heavy to drive with steppers, and a corexy from aluminium section with steel rails for the movement bearings, probably based on your design, but that's for experimenting once the Delta Pi is up and running.
Cheers
Steve