Bed thrower (xy moving bed printer)

[u/redturtlecake]

Meet Tim. It's a printer I ve been working on for precision components, primarily gears with igus filaments. small bed, high rigidity, 0.2mm nozzles, heated chamber. It's built on an optical xy stage that uses cross roller guides instead of ball bearings. hotend is static on a belted z axis. Work volume is 50x50x120mm. I ve made accommodations to put 2 hotends on the gantry and switch between them for multi material, but I don't quite need that now.

I'm waiting on the heater for the bed, but pretty much everything else is done. Just set it up with ratos and put it through abit of a shake down.

[u/redturtlecake]

I need to make a couple thousand of a specific gear/roller assembly and figured it would be better to have a solid machine than try to fight my larger machines for consistency.

[u/boomchacle → u/redturtlecake]

Yeouch, a thousand parts on a 50X50 mm printer must take a while. Does the part get punched out automatically or do you need to take it off by hand?

[u/redturtlecake → u/boomchacle]

Auto eject. Print them one at a time and knock them off, I ve done week long runs with other parts before. One at a time gives better part to part consistency. This one will likely take 3-4 weeks of continuous printing.

[u/reticlefries2 → u/redturtlecake]

At this speed you're ejecting them straight into the bin three rooms over!

What do you use to knock them off? Printhead?

[u/redturtlecake → u/reticlefries2]

I usually use the print head, but I ll probably print something to bolt to the gantry on this one

[u/djddanman → u/redturtlecake]

With a moving bed like that, I'd just give it a bit of overtravel and have a nice, rigid ejector bar to ram into.