I bought the duplicator i3 plus a couple of months back and although it worked great out the box I knew it could be much better, the mods started.
The Head:
The stock setup wasn’t that bad and was performing quite well. It just seemed to be lacking in the part cooling department. I went through about 4 fan shroud designs before I decided the head layout was just too limiting to get sufficient cooling. Whilst looking for ideas I see that the new E3D lite6 hotends were going really cheap and decided, sod it lets change the whole hotend.
I design a whole new carriage with detachable fan ducts. pretty happy with how it turned out.
The Bed:
New bearings and a sheet or mirror I had laying about. Nothing special.
Extruder:
As i had to redesign the head assembly I wanted to remove the extruder to reduce weight and go with a bowden setup. I could have bought an extruder off Ebay but i wanted to make my own, after all, that’s the point of owning a 3D printer isn’t t it?.
Looking at some of my prints you could see they were never really smooth. Looked like little bumps all over them. It was a minor thing but it could still be better. I came to the conclusion that the bumps were pluses from the extruder as it pushes the filament through. I decided to gear the extruder 3:1 to give it better resolution and wow did that help.
That makes me wonder (again) what a pro-level stepper controller would do then. Something like Gecko drives. I switched from a L293 type (plain) stepper driver to Gecko drives on my CNC machine and the difference was night and day. It even sounded so much quieter and smoother. I think the Makerbot stepper modules are based on a L293-like chip too. The Gecko’s are vector drivers.
Yeah i’ve been thinking the same. Was also looking at new steppers with a smaller step angle, such as 0.9 Degree. This will give double the resolution with with the same electronics.
