I have a printer I have basically built. It is a tronxy frame (and corexy motion), but over the years I have added linear rails, a duet 3d control board, quad zscrew independent leveling, a zesty nimble extruder, and other things.
My printer was down for 6 months or so, a new kitten we got ate some wires and it took me a bit to get the motivation to rebuild it. It turned out just a couple of things got unplugged and I was quickly back in business.
Ever since starting printing again I noticed that my tolerance has been off and it seemed to be over extruding quite a bit. I tuned my steps per mm, and driver power on the extruder motor to no avail. Eventually I replaced the motor and the nozzle (which was perfectly in check but if I was going that far I figured why not). It seems to have solved the problem... Sort of.
I have been using the prusa procedure to test and tune extrusion multiplier: print a 40x40x40 cube in vase mode, and measure the wall thickness. My extrusion width is .45mm, and until today I was getting a width of .52-.54mm. the replacement parts have cured this, if I measure in the right spots with my micrometer I get .45 exactly. But I have these bands. If I measure the high spots on the bands I get the same .52+ mm.
I looked at some of my old test boxes:
I have the same bands but different patterns.
A little googling and someone suggested (for a similar problem) that belt tendon was unequal. From what I can feel my tension seems to be the same.
I'm printing a tolerance test now to see if my issues are fixed, but I only feel 50% confident. Does anyone have any advice as to what might be going wrong? My belts have been on the printer since upgrading to linear rails and could probably use changing... But hopefully someone else has an idea?
It's easy to get out of hand when modding your printer. When I first got my tronxy in 2017 or 2018 the only planned mod was to put a duet 2 clone in instead of the garbage chitu control board. But the extruder sucked as well. Clone slice mosquito fixed that. Then I realized the extruder drive had a 700mm Bowden to the print head, and I wanted to print fast, so I asked Santa (my wife) for a zesty nimble (this was years before the orbiter direct drive). I had 3 vslot wheels disintegrate in a week and voron was using a cheap but high quality linear rails so why not? Then I built a couple of industrial kit printers for a friend, modix and raise3d. They weren't much more complicated then what I had, and I'm learning some cad so I designed a quad z system with rails and smooth rods like the modix. I had another fried edm machine part of the z sleds. It was so over engineered that I needed to put a bed worthy enough in top and that was the 400mm 3/8" thick tool plate. A heater to match, 400mm ac bed topped with 1/4' borosilicate glass.
This took time over several years. I would grab my z motion control and publish it somewhere because it's pretty simple but very effective.
Anyway... It has been a lot more fun and educational modding the printer then making silly doodads and fidget toys with it for sure.
Sounds like an epic build! I loled at the Santa bit, haha.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. I fall somewhere closer to the "I use my printer to make things", but I certainly spend time fiddling with my printer too.