Materia 101 assembled and it is running

Hardware Materia 101
1

I got the printer this week, assembled it in three evenings, and it seems to work after I downloaded the slic3r settings from Kristoffer Engdahl :slight_smile:

2

Other things that I noticed during assembly:

  • Sometimes I had to guess about certain photos in the assembly manual, first mounted the X assembly reversed on the Y carriage, and only found out in the end.

  • The y-axis bars were a little bit too long, I had to trim them with a file to get the y carriage in the chassis

  • Getting the stickers straight on the polycarbonate is a challenge actually

  • Since I couldn't get loctite in the weekend I used an extra M4 nut as a quick fix, is the Z screw the only one that needs loctite, does anything else need loctite at all?

  • the grey cable at the top of the materia 101 should be outside the frame to prevent wire scrape

  • the configuration for slic3r is explained by Kristoffer Engdahl, and you have to experiment what works best for your print.

  • painters tape works fine for PLA, I compared some of the materia prints to the similar prints that I made with an ABS device and they look the same, PLA is perhaps a bit more flexible than ABS, PLA smells sweet, and ABS has a penetrating smell.

  • So far I only had good print results when I selected PLA instead of use gcode parameters in the marlin printer menu

  • standby with a long tweezer to remove the first cold blop of PLA from the extruder, this is normal with PLA, but you want it off the printbed because it can cause prints to fail. The initial cold blop also occurs with ABS, but, with PLA it is a bit worse. There is no good software solution for this problem in my opinion

  • the z adjustment is critical, about the width of a papersheet has to go between the extruder and the printbed, and it takes a while until the 4 printbed m3 bolts are properly adjusted.

  • Am I right that the material fan only comes on when there is a need to (is it temperature related?)

So far so good, I like this printer.

3

So, I got loctite and it is something you like, because the printer bed wobble that I noticed seems to have been reduced. Loctite is unfortunately expensive unless you order the 5 ml over the internet. Would be a good plan if the materia 101 kit included 5 ml of threadlock.

4

A movie of the Materia 101 in action

5

The settings for the fan is controlled by the length it takes to print one layer. The shorter time, the more power the fan gets.

However with PLA we often run the fan at almost 50% all the time, except for the bottom layer where it is turned off and on bridges where it is turned on full blast 100%. We use M106 S0 in the start gcode to disable the fan to let the hotend heat up fast.

I am looking into the possibility of making a shroud for the fan to make the cooling more efficient and changing so that the fan is running full blast all the time we have even talked about using a more powerful fan together with the directional shroud.

6

I just jammed the rods in, got there with gentle tapping. Instructions and pictures are pretty confusing; I've had to go back and re-do something every couple steps in the construction. There is a lot of room for improvement there.

7

I agree with badmole, the assembly instructions are confusing, but in the end there is only one way to get the printer to work. I had to reassemble the xy carriage in the end because the material cooling fan was pointing to the back. Later I discovered I had to tighten the bolt holding the extruder block to the xy carriage. Checking once in a while whether something went loose is not a bad practice when you assemble something like this, also, slightly lubricate the axes, in particular the spindle.

8

ejo60:

  • Getting the stickers straight on the polycarbonate is a challenge actually

I found it useful to mark out the sticker placement on my shell with a dry-erase marker and a ruler before placing any stickers. This helped get them dead on.