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.
I am developing this as a kit for the i3 plus. Additional parts are needed to get it to work and the printer needs quite a bit of rewiring. Also requires an E3D hot end.
The kit will include a genuine E3D v6 hotend, screws, printed parts and a pre-made wiring harness that just plugs in.
It’s not ready to go just yet, but I can offer you a full kit with all the parts at cost if you willing to a beta test for me.
