Y Stepper Belt Slop (Page 2 of 2)

The hole for the bearing retention is slightly undersized, and you can simply screw the 3mm screw in and it will thread itself directly into the plastic.  Now nuts needed.

Solidoodle needs to take note of this if they intend to continue making the SD4.

but hey they havnt taken notes of anything this forum has proven needs done for several years yet so .....sigh! guess SD falls into the "cant fix stupid" category.

great perseverance solving this issue dude! kudos!

This is a very promising mod, so I hope I'm doing something wrong as I don't get any improvement when  trying this myself. I printed the STLs, got the appropriate bearing, screw it in, screwed the printed parts to the motor and  tried few different springs.

Result without this mod: https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-5X-w … 1600/2.jpg

I've also recorded a video of how it works.

One things I noticed was I had to flip the pulley on the y motor so the bearing would align perfectly with the belt.

I dont see the flat spots on your pic b4 mod? maybe yours was ok already?

It could very well be.  My original circles were a lot worse than yours.  At small sizes, they weren't even circles.

Er... that's not gonna happen.  If you want to test the effect of the tensioning mod without a pillow block, you can try that on your own printer.

That's not what I want to test. I wanted to know if the bearings had any positive effect on the circles and how much they contributed to your solution vs this mod (because this mod by itself doesn't seem to help me at all) before I would buy and wait for my own flanged bearings to ship.
The stock SD4 pillow is easy to remove. I guess the custom one you are using isn't. Sorry then, I didn't know.

Well then, can you please post a straight top-down photo of a circle you have printed after this mod? The photos are at a bit of an angle and hard to tell for me.

I'm glad at least one of us Solidoodle 4 owners has reached a point where hes satisfied with the quality of the prints. Even if the rest of us don't know exactly what the solution is. Will just order stuff online and add one upgrade after the other I guess.

Wait, I feel an idiot now for missing this. So you have a Solidoodle 3?
Jagowilson, I guess our problem is not Solidoodle 4 exclusive then.

However, it could still be an issue with newer batches of Solidoodle 3 and SD4, like swtiching to different quality parts on the printer.
Otherwise wardjr either got lucky with his specific Solidoodle 3 for not suffering from this problem or his SD3 still has some things privan's was missing to print fine without any mod.

Anyway, I'm really excited someone was able to fix the problem finally.
Though I'll be annoying and again ask for top-down photo of a circle print after you installed this mod. The last one you shoot was very close just a bit front view rather than top view.

BTW, have you also repaced the side bushings with flanged bearing as well, or only that pillow in the middle of the rod (Thingiverse link?)

It was a joke, I don't think I'm annoying for asking this basic thing which many others have done already. There's no need for the rudeness. I'm just asking for a photo because the one you made was at an angle and that adds perspective to the circles. It doesn't matter if the photo was good enough for you, I'm the one asking you for help.
It takes 40 seconds to print and 4 cm of filament. I'd certainly do if others who still suffer from this problem thought it could help them. But then again I'd also spend my time to remove any other mod to see which one(s) were necessary for solving the issue so others wouldn't spend time and money buying bearings and printing pillow blocks and printing this mod without knowing if they all are necessary (in fact, I'm talking with others with this issue in the forums, pm and via email now). I guess we think differently.

Thanks for sharing the STLs.

I was taking everything apart to finish my fishing line conversion and install a better bearing support on the Y rod, so I printed up one of these gadgets to try out while I was at it. Here's a comparison (the circle on the left is after adding the spring and bearing to enable the gadget):

More details here:

http://home.comcast.net/~tomhorsley/har … nsion.html

I gotta make a slightly longer spring now and see if it gets even better with more force, but it is definitely headed in the right direction (actually didn't seem to make much difference with a more powerful spring).

Now I'm wondering if a bearing on both sides would work even better? I'm imagining something like a scissors arrangement with a bearing on both sides of the belt (if there is room) and a tension spring or bungee at the bottom to try and close the scissors on the belt.

Thanks! I fixed 'em now. That's the trouble with having my local copy, everything works when I check it from here :-).

Here is what I see that is "different". When the belt is on a down stroke (moving counter-clockwise), it pushes the pressure bearing out, when it's on the up stroke it relaxes more, and the bearing pushes the belt in more.

That tells me the belt has more authority over the bearing, and It should be the other way around.

That means the spring is not strong enough.

On my printer, the bearing seems to have the same pressure in both direction.