Thanks for the comment. I know it's 7 months old by now but good and correct information is timeless (well, that is, until it's outdated which it isn't in this case!). I'm designing right now my own printer/light job CNC/laser engraver and went quite balls out on it, which does include drag chains on all axis. This does give me good info on how to set them up properly when assembling. I'm also looking into protecting the linear rods and lead screws against dust since I plan on using it as a PCB drill and wood mill, was gonna add some protective bellows on it, enclosing even the drag chains but that turned out a tad too hard and costly, still gonna find a way to protect those rods and lead screws tho.

I was wondering what the whole CR-10 vs CR-10 deal was

The CR-10 is Sooooooo much better than the CR-10...

cr10.....

Wasn't that the Ender 3?

where can I get a CR-10 with internal control box? xD it's cool Thomas, they both kinda look the same. none gonna blame you. besides, you used only your notes and you sounded just as good as you always do.

🥳

nice to see you are back

yayeee!!!! i really like the lulzbot printer design

Was looking for this, most people cheap out when buying cable and therefore think all cable is created equal as solid.

Fellow NDr here... I cant believe that some "big" 3d printing company actually is in our state! It's really odd lol

Based on a true story...

Is that the Fargo from the movie / series?

So they down grade

@@lukedavid8099 And it's really cool! I'm sick and tired of all those countless one-hung-low asian companies.. :D

Im glad I have wanted one of their printers even since i started watching James Brutons videos. I ordered my first prusa a week ago so its going to be a while before i get a Lulz.

We build custom toolheads, and have tons of parts for lulzbot machines, so if you ever have any questions, let us know.

@@TomsBackyardWorkshop I can vouch for the quality of IT-Works 3D's toolheads. I ordered a 1.75mm Titan Aero Pro (for my Taz 6) from them a while back and it works like a dream. Being able to use the same filament on both my Prusa and Lulzbot is incredibly convenient.

Much love for IT-Works 3D, you guys gave me a great deal on an open box Taz 6 back in 2017 and it has been running like a champ ever since.

They just finished their move there and have gotten their print farm back up and running. I finally got a response on a support ticket and it looks like they are ramping service back up. I was very glad to see them survive and start getting back on their feet.

This is the only kink-shaming I'll tolerate ;)

booo! get bent! (scnr)

@@AndrewGillard you will tolerate all kink shaming and like it .

brilliant idea! Noise-wise it should be better them drag chain, definitely gonna use it.

A large stainless steel cable tie is even better, doesn't have the very sharp edges of a tape measure and can be drilled and anchored at the ends.

@npgoalkeeper _ you can drill it of course. But duplex stainless is more malleable and durable, not thin, brittle and prone to cracking like tape measure, good luck with a drilled anchor in that. Tape measure with its commonly bowed crossection is designed for straight runs with bending in one plane, not bending load and flexion in more than one. I.E how to destroy a tape measure quickly, repeatedly bend and stress it in anything but that one axis, even then they are considered a consumable in the building industry. Those end anchors are important, because if you don't rigidly anchor the ends of what is effectively a spring then you are increasing the load on whatever strain relief, if any, you've provided for your cable run by half the spring constant per end.

Does Prusa Original exhibit the artifact too? I'm thinking just deleting the typical bed springs can make a lot of this artifact go away. I mean it stands to reason that the springs allow some rotational movement of the bed around the center of the bed carriage, and the Y acceleration of the bed assembly would impart this spring movement. It's a possibility, that the weight of the print has fairly little influence on the artifact, but the progressive worsening comes merely from the fact that the same angle of rotation will impart a higher displacement up the print. Fundamentally, there is a weight influence, as the acceleration is fixed in software, thus there is a higher driving force to maintain same acceleration with increasing weight, and in turn some of this force ends up acting against the springs and compressing them. Making the springs significantly stiffer or preloading them with a lot more force can be a valid partial mitigation. I have never heard of a Voron, looking now, quite intrigued. Most printers with vertically moving bed still have some construction issues, such as the rods being more prone to bend in the middle of the bed travel. The thing to remember with Delta is that they can be overall pretty flimsy and can only drive super light toolheads, but at least its flimsiness only ever affects the head, not the platform. Still, it can vary depending on print head height.

Yeah, he should had said cat5 patch cables

@@Nero_XY I've seen patch cables with solid core wire too

the common one is the solid core tbh.

@@frankhovis Then they weren't proper patch cables, even if sold as such - all the standards (US, European etc) require stranded wire for patch cables and solid for infrastructure.

@@WazheadBoci Only for fixed infrastructure cable, though.

i think a lot of people use them just for their looks

As long as the connector has strain relief...

Flat-flex cables[1] have been used in consumer 2D printers *forever* at this point, and for good reason, so it's nice to see them appearing in 3D printers as well. Just as with drag chains and any other wire management system, you do still have to design things properly to ensure the FFC doesn't bend too tightly, either along its length or at a connector, but I'd guess it's a bit easier than with regular wires because you only really have one direction of movement to worry about. You also have to be careful with the current you're putting through them, as the copper is intentionally very thin, and each wire/track within the FFC tends not to be very wide either, but you have to do that with any wire, so that's not a big deal. I'm assuming that the X1 gangs multiple tracks in parallel for things like the hotend heater. [1] I could be wrong, but I think the X1 uses FFCs rather than ribbon cables. FFCs are essentially flexible PCBs - a layer of copper sandwiched between two layers of polyimide ("Kapton"/"Koptan"/"Captain™" tape). Ribbon cables are the things used to connect ancient PATA/IDE hard disk drives and floppy disk drives to PCs :)

@@ManIkWeet yup, always one of the first things to print when you get a Sidewinder haha

@npgoalkeeper _ This is true, yes. I may be guilty of underestimating the cost of that (monetary/complexity/maintainability) because I'm an electronics hobbyist who enjoys designing PCBs, can get very good results from home-etched boards (pre-sensitised laminates from Bungard, or Microtrak from the now-defunct-I-think Mega Electronics in the UK, rather than using a toner-transfer method or a self-applied etch-resist film; though those are typically only for prototypes, with final boards ordered from Seeed, usually), has no trouble soldering even fairly fine-pitch components, and has the disposable income to throw at stuff like that (mustn't forget that aspect!). I'm just currently lacking the time for this stuff! 😣 In fact, I already have a couple of moderately-complex PCBs as part of my printer - one is mostly to take the EN+STEP+DIR lines of the 5 motor outputs of my Smoothieboard X5 and feed them into sockets for Trinamic TMC2100 silentStepStick modules, with various configuration jumpers, input for a dedicated power supply for the motor drivers, and such. The other is a Raspberry Pi HAT to control various things like lighting & fans in the LACK enclosure. At some point I'd like to publish the schematics, PCB layouts, gerbers, etc., as well as KZfaq video(s) discussing them, but my life has been a mess over the past few years and I've not yet been able to find the time 😩 Anyway, bear in mind that FFC breakout PCBs are available to buy pretty affordably, if you don't want to create your own. Pimoroni has their "What The Flex" product, which is admittedly on the pricier end of things, but accepts FFCs with up to 40 pins/lines and with either 0.5mm or 1.0mm pitch (the two most commonly seen pin pitches in FFCs). It breaks that out to a *single row* of 0.1"/2.54mm header pins, and has a prototyping area, IIRC. Though being a single row does mean it's a fairly wide PCB. Alternatively you can find FFC breakouts all over eBay and AliExpress for only a few money units (probably Banggood, too, but I rarely search there). They're primarily in 0.5mm and 1.0mm pitches (others are available, I believe), and with a wide range of FFC widths/pin counts, so you can buy one that exactly matches the FFC you're using and have it fit perfectly, which is probably better for semi-permanent use than Pimoroni's What The Flex, which relies on you inserting the FFC in exactly the right position if it's not using all 40 pins. The AliExpress/eBay boards also use two rows of pins, which dramatically reduces board width - again, making them better for semi-permanent use, but less-convenient for prototyping and experimentation.

Mine looks like a jungle

I''ve the same issue on a new build. I used the thicker split conduit for the X axis and the spiral wrap for the y axis, but need to make the X axis wires longer since I like to run them over the gantry on my other machines. The wiring going into the SKR mini is a nightmare though. I suppose I need to hack on the Marlin sources some to get the sd card reader on the LCD to work, since right now I have a tacky looking SD to microSD extension going directly into the board and foam taped to the acrylic.

I did the same thing a few years ago for my DIY printer, except I bought 2mm thick nylon fishing wire. It was too flexible, so I braided 3 strands together and hot-glued (no other glues really stuck to nylon) them on both ends - this braided "wire" is enough for reinforcement of the sleeve. The machine is an i3-style printer, so I routed the extruder/X-axis cables from the top of the frame under 45deg pointing up-backwards. This gets you a nice large radius across a wide range of Z heights. To this date, I haven't found a better mechanism (drag chains included) and I'm a recreational CNC machine builder. Too bad I can't post links to images here.

@@jirij I see the main advantage of the steel band that it is flexible in one direction, but it is nearly not to bend in the other, just like the cable chain. In my CoreXY printer I could get the cables in a form like a fibonacci curve instead of looping them upwards. So I could make the enclosure smaller.

I am only not sure how fast the thin steel will cut through the sleeve

I have seen someone use cheap tape measure innards. Another i have seen used is polypropylene sheet, such as from a plastic document folder or a kitchen mat.

I can vouch for that, that's what I use. Look for large stainless steel cable ties. They are cheap and readily available in sizes from big enough to huge, easy to work and durable. Perfect for the job.

Damn that's genius! I can already see easy ways to integrate this and connect it to printed mounts....time to dig out my guinea pig printer for a test!

Another possibility is to use polypropylene sheet, such as from a plastic folder of from a kitchen mat. Once you constrain both ends to one direction, the middle section forms a smooth loop. I don't know whether i came up with this thought independently, but it's not very original, googling it up it's part of several Mendel90 build instructions.

They ended up getting bought out, so Lulzbot is in business again.

@@_Piers_ good to hear. Expensive product, but the ones that are in use by some of my fellow engineers go 24×7. They shut them down to load filament, that's about it.

Ribbon cables are not that expensive. In Farnell's catalog there are ribbon cables with guaranteed cycle time on assuming a certain bending radius. I've installed one in 2006 in a machine (not in a 3D printer though so less movement) but way above 20million so far and the rating was only 10 million. I would rather buy these even when they are a little bit more expensive, the reliability is impressive, compared to a normal ribbon cable.

Did this work or did it fail too quick?

@@VertexDigitalArts I understand your point, but on the other hand 3D printing components at a decreased cost is also one of the main purposes as well

A strand of ABS or PTFE tube might be better if avaliable. Just thinking eventually PLA asorbs water and becomes even more brittle. I have had old PLA snap off at the extruder for no reason when the printer is idle overnight.

@@Side85Winder PLA does not get more brittle from absorbing water, it gets less brittle from absorbing water. Just throw a piece of PLA into water and observe. You can keep it with water in a bag for a week and you shall observe that it got just more flexible and tougher, very nice. But you still shouldn't print with PLA which has absorbed water, as it will foam up and potentially degrade chemically during the melting process. I suggest that if your extruder has PTFE lining, it may be implicated in plastic deterioration, by releasing highly reactive fluorine compounds. It might not be polymerised fully, coming from low-quality chemical manufacturing, and it may be degraded by heat cycling. Some people found that simply inserting a piece of PLA into a PTFE tube for a while will make it brittle. Other influences that have been found to rapidly make PLA brittle are UV light and ozone.

I know you're not asking me, but my 2 cents, I've two printers with injected molded chains and 2 with printed chains. So long as your printer is tuned nicely, the printed chains work just as well as injected ones. One thing I like better about my printed chains is I use a design with 2 different links....one has 1 side open (like a U) and the other has the opposite side open....so when I need to remove/replace/add any wires, I just deconstruct the drag chain link by link instead of having to disconnect every wire and feed it back through the drag chain.

If you print them with PLA they make more noise then injected nylon ones.

I've used both printed and injection molded and by far just buy some injection molded ones. There super cheap and will last forever. All my pla links warped from the heat bed, abs ones cracked after a year/10,000 hrs. For how long they take to print it's not worth it. They're also no as smooth as real ones. Either too tight or too loose. I have also printed the u shape ones mentioned above. It sounds good but was just as much as a pain and over all made the links weaker and more play. Also kept loosing the bars. For the all of 2 times ever in 3 years it's not that much of a convenience

Do you also print them 3 times?