Post by highcooley on Jan 14, 2013 10:23:46 GMT -5
Hello people
Due to popular demand, I decided to write a review about my recently built Rostock Max by the US based company seemecnc.com.
After hours and hours of more or less successful tinkering with my sumpod original, I was in desperate need of some fresh air. Don't get me wrong here; I am absolutely convinced, that a sumpod can be evolved into a reliable machine. However, I was fed up with spending a lot of precious money and time for even more trial and error. So I decided, it was time to see how other machines are built and how they work.
Why a Rostock Max? The fast and ergonomic moving delta robots always fascinated me. However, many people building Rostocks reported additional problems to cartesian systems. A delta carriage has a lot of joints and connections, which have to be very rigid in order to provide accurate movement. The long timing belts, required to move the delta arms, are additional (possibly backlashing) parts in a long chain to bring the motor movement to the build plate. Obviously, self printed Rostocks need a lot of tweaking and fiddling, until they are accurate enough to print nicely. That's when Seemecnc's Indiegogo campaign came into play. I didn't know the company before, but a short research showed, that they successfully sold working reprap style printers with an own, working extruder & hot-end combination. Moreover, they construct mainly with rigid laser cut wood, metal and molded plastic. This, as well as the reasonable price convinced me to give the Rostock max a try. Three weeks after I pledged for the project, a huge parcel arrived, containing everything needed to build the machine (except 8 interchanged screws).
The build
Total build time was about 15h for three engineers. Of course, the kit came with imperial parts, but most of them could be swapped with metric ones. Except for the missing screws, we had nothing to alter or to dig up additional parts. The kit is well manufactured and it is distinguishable, that skilled people with a lot of experience designed it. I was deeply impressed by all the neat construction details, which made life so much easier.
For example the obvious things like doors to hide the cabling, prepared for adding cable straps, once everything is working fine. As well as slots to pas through the cabling to the front side:
The next gen RAMBO board is another neat feature :-)
The configuration
...went smoothly and very fast, thanks to an almost 100% pre-configured, functional marlin. Delta printer leveling and adjustment is different to other printers. Every time you adjust the endstop of one of the three axes, it affects both, Z-height and bed level in an unfamiliar way. It's a bit like balancing the tetrahedron on its tip. But in the end, you just have to get used to the system and adjust one axis after the other around the triangle for several times.
The printing
Well, I spare you all the ugly test prints which came out of the printer for a long time. The seemecnc guys mainly print with ABS, so there was no fan, neither a fan mount included in the kit. Also, PLA sticks to the included PC print surface like hell (it does not bond, but hardly comes off at all). To keep a long story short, the nozzle was oozing and the makeshift mounted fan, to cool the thermal barrier, slightly blew over the heating block. This caused temperature misreads, leading to too much heat and the partly melting of the PEEK part. The stop-the-ooze part was solved by fiddling with the nozzle tightening. The solution for the fan partly cooling the wrong parts of the hot-end was the design of a fan mount:
And that's how recent prints look like (the dent in the gear was caused by a temporary jam/stall, which never happened ever again since):
...which leads to three remaining issues:
One: The ugly surface which I don't know why it looks like this yet. Probably has something to do with print temperature.
Two: The offset of perimeters and filling, caused exactly by the backlash, mentioned above. On recommendation of another Rostock user, I already tensioned the timing belts quite a lot. Maybe, I have to go even further or it has something to do with the joints of the carriage construction being too tight and causing the arms to bend slightly before moving.
Three: Having a steady print bed is an absolute plus and makes life a lot easier...no change in angle or position, due to movement, nothing. However, what I underestimated is the movement due to thermal expansion. A flat glass surface is not exactly flat when heated and a screwed down heat bed bends when heated, as well.
Anyways, that's where I currently stand with my Rostock Max. Not a perfect working printer yet, but already miles ahead of where I ever came with my sumpod. I learned a lot about correct hot-end cooling and I think, I could manage to get this print quality on the sumpod now. However, right at the moment the motivation to work on that is not very high, sitting next to a working printer :-)
To sum up:
+ Nicely engineered, complete kit
+ Very rigid construction
+ Working hot-end and extruder
+ Exemplary customer support and well managed forum
- Feared backlash occurred and is not yet resolved
- Build vlog is pretty tedious and the user written manual not yet perfect and complete
- Not fully prepared for PLA printing (missing fan, mount and optimal print surface), but the hot-end works well
More information about my build can be found on my buildlog on seemecnc's forum: forum.seemecnc.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=1036
Thank you for your comments and questions!
Cheers,
Andy
Due to popular demand, I decided to write a review about my recently built Rostock Max by the US based company seemecnc.com.
After hours and hours of more or less successful tinkering with my sumpod original, I was in desperate need of some fresh air. Don't get me wrong here; I am absolutely convinced, that a sumpod can be evolved into a reliable machine. However, I was fed up with spending a lot of precious money and time for even more trial and error. So I decided, it was time to see how other machines are built and how they work.
Why a Rostock Max? The fast and ergonomic moving delta robots always fascinated me. However, many people building Rostocks reported additional problems to cartesian systems. A delta carriage has a lot of joints and connections, which have to be very rigid in order to provide accurate movement. The long timing belts, required to move the delta arms, are additional (possibly backlashing) parts in a long chain to bring the motor movement to the build plate. Obviously, self printed Rostocks need a lot of tweaking and fiddling, until they are accurate enough to print nicely. That's when Seemecnc's Indiegogo campaign came into play. I didn't know the company before, but a short research showed, that they successfully sold working reprap style printers with an own, working extruder & hot-end combination. Moreover, they construct mainly with rigid laser cut wood, metal and molded plastic. This, as well as the reasonable price convinced me to give the Rostock max a try. Three weeks after I pledged for the project, a huge parcel arrived, containing everything needed to build the machine (except 8 interchanged screws).
The build
Total build time was about 15h for three engineers. Of course, the kit came with imperial parts, but most of them could be swapped with metric ones. Except for the missing screws, we had nothing to alter or to dig up additional parts. The kit is well manufactured and it is distinguishable, that skilled people with a lot of experience designed it. I was deeply impressed by all the neat construction details, which made life so much easier.
For example the obvious things like doors to hide the cabling, prepared for adding cable straps, once everything is working fine. As well as slots to pas through the cabling to the front side:
The next gen RAMBO board is another neat feature :-)
The configuration
...went smoothly and very fast, thanks to an almost 100% pre-configured, functional marlin. Delta printer leveling and adjustment is different to other printers. Every time you adjust the endstop of one of the three axes, it affects both, Z-height and bed level in an unfamiliar way. It's a bit like balancing the tetrahedron on its tip. But in the end, you just have to get used to the system and adjust one axis after the other around the triangle for several times.
The printing
Well, I spare you all the ugly test prints which came out of the printer for a long time. The seemecnc guys mainly print with ABS, so there was no fan, neither a fan mount included in the kit. Also, PLA sticks to the included PC print surface like hell (it does not bond, but hardly comes off at all). To keep a long story short, the nozzle was oozing and the makeshift mounted fan, to cool the thermal barrier, slightly blew over the heating block. This caused temperature misreads, leading to too much heat and the partly melting of the PEEK part. The stop-the-ooze part was solved by fiddling with the nozzle tightening. The solution for the fan partly cooling the wrong parts of the hot-end was the design of a fan mount:
And that's how recent prints look like (the dent in the gear was caused by a temporary jam/stall, which never happened ever again since):
...which leads to three remaining issues:
One: The ugly surface which I don't know why it looks like this yet. Probably has something to do with print temperature.
Two: The offset of perimeters and filling, caused exactly by the backlash, mentioned above. On recommendation of another Rostock user, I already tensioned the timing belts quite a lot. Maybe, I have to go even further or it has something to do with the joints of the carriage construction being too tight and causing the arms to bend slightly before moving.
Three: Having a steady print bed is an absolute plus and makes life a lot easier...no change in angle or position, due to movement, nothing. However, what I underestimated is the movement due to thermal expansion. A flat glass surface is not exactly flat when heated and a screwed down heat bed bends when heated, as well.
Anyways, that's where I currently stand with my Rostock Max. Not a perfect working printer yet, but already miles ahead of where I ever came with my sumpod. I learned a lot about correct hot-end cooling and I think, I could manage to get this print quality on the sumpod now. However, right at the moment the motivation to work on that is not very high, sitting next to a working printer :-)
To sum up:
+ Nicely engineered, complete kit
+ Very rigid construction
+ Working hot-end and extruder
+ Exemplary customer support and well managed forum
- Feared backlash occurred and is not yet resolved
- Build vlog is pretty tedious and the user written manual not yet perfect and complete
- Not fully prepared for PLA printing (missing fan, mount and optimal print surface), but the hot-end works well
More information about my build can be found on my buildlog on seemecnc's forum: forum.seemecnc.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=1036
Thank you for your comments and questions!
Cheers,
Andy