1 Topic by rspeed

  • rspeed
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Topic: Solidoodle 3 Quality Control

My friend bought a Solidoodle 3 a few months ago, but he never really started using it because he had trouble getting it work. I offered to figure it out for him, and I was surprised to find that it didn't seem to have been calibrated, or even tested.

The biggest issue popped out immediately when I sent the carriage to the home position. Surprisingly, the X axis motor was in risk of burning out because its stop switch just didn't activate. At first it looked like the switch was being pressed, but after looking closer it turned out it was only making contact with the extruder carriage, but not actually activating. The zip tie that wraps around the extruder was bumping into a part on the right side Y axis carriage. This was easy to fix temporarily with a small piece of cardboard, (once I got the printer working I made a little custom shim as a permanent fix) but I was rather shocked that such an obvious fault wasn't caught during testing.

The second issue I found is that the printer was configured to use about 72% more plastic than it's supposed to. Solidoodle mentions that this is expected, but nothing ever close to that level. This actually had me hung up for quite a while because the anchor blob was so huge that it just got stuck to the extruder and nothing could print.

Once I'd solved those problems, I then found that the "true circle" alignment was so far off that the Y axis would get hung up while moving. I followed the instructions to realign it, but still haven't been able to get anything close to round circles.

My friend was expecting doing some tweaking, but it took me two full days to get the printer working. Am I right to assume that this machine simply got shipped without actually being tested and calibrated, or is this a pretty standard experience?

2 Reply by Claghorn

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Re: Solidoodle 3 Quality Control

Actually, if you examine the print bed in the right light, you'll see that the spool holder was printed on it by solidoodle (at least it was on mine), so I believe they leave Brooklyn fairly well calibrated, but the way they are built, they can't survive a long trip on a UPS truck without getting totally uncalibrated by the time they arrive.

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3 Reply by elmoret

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Re: Solidoodle 3 Quality Control

rspeed wrote:

Surprisingly, the X axis motor was in risk of burning out because its stop switch just didn't activate.

This isn't how stepper motors work.

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4 Reply by Hazer

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Re: Solidoodle 3 Quality Control

rspeed wrote:

My friend bought a Solidoodle 3 a few months ago, but he never really started using it because he had trouble getting it work. I offered to figure it out for him, and I was surprised to find that it didn't seem to have been calibrated, or even tested.

The biggest issue popped out immediately when I sent the carriage to the home position. Surprisingly, the X axis motor was in risk of burning out because its stop switch just didn't activate. At first it looked like the switch was being pressed, but after looking closer it turned out it was only making contact with the extruder carriage, but not actually activating. The zip tie that wraps around the extruder was bumping into a part on the right side Y axis carriage. This was easy to fix temporarily with a small piece of cardboard, (once I got the printer working I made a little custom shim as a permanent fix) but I was rather shocked that such an obvious fault wasn't caught during testing.

The second issue I found is that the printer was configured to use about 72% more plastic than it's supposed to. Solidoodle mentions that this is expected, but nothing ever close to that level. This actually had me hung up for quite a while because the anchor blob was so huge that it just got stuck to the extruder and nothing could print.

Once I'd solved those problems, I then found that the "true circle" alignment was so far off that the Y axis would get hung up while moving. I followed the instructions to realign it, but still haven't been able to get anything close to round circles.

My friend was expecting doing some tweaking, but it took me two full days to get the printer working. Am I right to assume that this machine simply got shipped without actually being tested and calibrated, or is this a pretty standard experience?

From what I have seen on the boards, they all come like this. Although, a bit strange about the X endstop. All I can say is there were alot of posts in the past (and web reviews) where the printed parts of the SD1 and SD2 ended up broken during shipping. From what I have seen in the past 6 months, there seems to be more posts about how 'uncalibrated' the machines arrive. So, one might guess that when everything is calibrated correctly, shipping the unit would end up with broken parts due to the stress of everything tightened to the rigt tensions. And now, everything is pretty loose when they arrive. Seems rather weird to go from one end of the spectrum to the other. As in, it would make sense to loosen all of the parts that keep breaking right before boxing the unit, and leave instructions on how to calibrate everything when you receive it. But thats speculation.

Read through the wikis. Perform all of the calibrations. Dont give up on the X/Y belts for circles. Just keep working on it and dont half-a$$ it either, do the full calibration where you align all of the pulleys. The out-of-the-box calibration takes the longest, but every calibration from then on is easy. I calibrate mine every 2 months, takes about an hour to do them all. And you will end up with a pretty decent running printer (that you will become familiar with).

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5 Reply by rspeed

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Re: Solidoodle 3 Quality Control

Thanks for all the comments. I'll try giving the circle calibration another try.