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Topic: [NOOB] Solidoodle 4: What are the best upgrades I can make?

I purchased my Solidoodle 4 last spring, and so far I have been very satisfied with it. Started a little shaky for the first few weeks, but with some minor fixes I got it running great. Its been a few months now, and I'm looking to upgrade it to run better.

I am looking for any upgrades that you have done or seen in the past and that are partially printable. Anything you have to offer is wonderful, but I also listed some goals below. Thank you everyone!

Goals:
- Have the motors be a little quieter
- Utilize some acrylic glass I bought for a new print bed
- Less belt slips/need to recalibrate belts
- New type of spool holding devices so my PLA doesn't snap between the tiny hole so easily

2 (edited by grob 2014-08-29 05:36:58)

Re: [NOOB] Solidoodle 4: What are the best upgrades I can make?

Welcome to the forum!

Regarding your goals:
- Motors are as loud as they like. Not really any such thing as a quiet one. You'll just have to learn to sing along to the songs; my favourite is the April 2012 top-ten smash hit by prog rock group 'Slic3r' entitled "hexagon infill". tongue
- Acrylic might not be the best option for the bed, if you're using ABS - a little too melty, it will degrade pretty quick. PLA is a touch cooler so may be fine; not sure myself. Consider using regular glass or a mirror, and either hairspray or glue-stick as a sticking agent - many on this forum swear by this fancy-smelling combo (including me!)
- Run through the regular belt adjustment procedures, and print some cylinders to get your circles looking good. Search for "perfect circles" for more info.
- There are a million spool holders and suchforth on thingiverse and the net in general, have a think and take a pick. You'll be sure to improve on the PVC pipe that comes with the stock machine (although I haven't got around to this quite yet, with a couple of bushings and top-entry it works OK for me).

Some more serious mods I'd consider are all in the sticky section of this part of the forum:
* If you have trouble with your hot end (not everyone does!), then consider going about installing an E3D hot end, they're rather good and there's plenty of info here to get one going
* Bearing blocks and ball bearings (to replace existing bushings) on the y driveshaft to improve circles
* Replacing bushings in the x and y axes with linear bearings
* Upgrading the firmware to the community version to get things like LCD/SD support and backlash correction

We tend to search here using google: e.g. "site:soliforum.com linear bearings"; the built-in search tool is a bit rough. smile

Have fun, happy printing!

SD3. Mk2b + glass, heated enclosure, GT2 belts, direct drive y shaft, linear bearings, bowden-feed E3D v5 w/ 0.9° stepper
Smoothieboard via Octoprint on RPi

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Re: [NOOB] Solidoodle 4: What are the best upgrades I can make?

Very helpful! Thank you so much! Yeah, right now I have a few just very minor mods to help with spool stuff and WD-40 is always nice for squeaky things.

I am indeed looking into some serious mods though. Thats why I posted on here, because I do not know where to start with the serious mods. I'll check out the things you mentioned though! Thank you again!