31 Jul

Makibox 3D Printer

I had the option to get my birthday present about two months early. Jumped at the chance.

Makibox, a 3D printer company, is selling off its entire stock of printers (makiboxclearance.co.uk), so it was a chance to get something cheap that I can hack on.

The package only took a week or so deliver, which is much better service than I expected, based on some of the messages I’d seen online.

I bought the unheated version (here) in kit form.

It took a few hours to put the machine together. I didn’t try printing anything until the next day.

The printer works by raising and lowering a print bed (the Z axis), and moving a “hot end” around on top of that in X and Y. The hot end hangs from the centre of two crossbeams, one of which moves in X and the other in Y.

The first problem I encountered, was that when I went to print for the first time, the hot end immediately started carving a pretty pattern into the bed. The printer didn’t know where the bed was, so was lowering the hotend too far down.

This kept happening even after I used the “bed leveling wizard” in Cura, the first step of which is /supposed/ to define where the bed is. But, no matter how accurately I did the first step, it totally ignored that and reset automatically to a level where it thought the bed was a few millimetres lower than it actually was, making the hot end drive straight into the bed.

It took me a while to figure out the problem – that the bed depth was “hard-coded” into the printer’s hardware – before every print, it would raise the bed right up until the platform-raising piece on the X axis screw touched against the “end-stop” switch at the top.

The solution to that was to glue something to the top of the platform-raising piece so it would hit the switch sooner. In the end, I glued a scrabble piece and a sim card (I had them at hand) on. This artificially lowered the expected bed depth by about 2cm, which is much more than is needed for the hot-end that comes with the printer, but is perfect for the replacement hot-end I ordered next.

The original hot-end sucks. They even say it themselves – in their words, “the standard hotend in the makibox kit is not the greatest piece of engineering ever made by man, it does have a tendency to burn out”.

The first problem I encountered with that hot-end was that it has no way of cooling off. There is an aluminium wall on one side of the base-plate, which could hold a heat-sink, but the heat-sink would be a case of “too little, too late”, as the hot-end should really be cooled right above the heating element, not 3cm above it. The problem is that when the hot-end’s heat spreads upwards, the plastic being pushed into it melts too soon, and it ends up like trying to push goo through a small hole at the bottom of a can, using a piece of spaghetti.

I /was/ going to try solve this by wrapping some tubing around the hollow bolt above the heating element, and run water through it, but the hot-end just stopped working on me completely, so I decided to pay for a better solution.

This solution was the E3D V6 (Lite), which has a proper heatsink, and a fan.

The E3D V6 took a few days to arrive, and when it did, there was a few hours assembly needed. The hardest part was figuring out how to connect the Bowden tube to the Makibox’s extruder. I managed this in the end by taking an M6 (I think. maybe it was M5?) nut and screwing it directly onto the end of the Bowden tube, then the new tube would dock into the extruder just like the original.

The next problem is one I’m still working on solving. The hot-end is positioned by moving two beams. The hot-end hangs from where the beams cross each other. The problem is that the beams are moved by long screws on /one end/ of the beam. The part that connects to the screw tries to keep the beams perpendicular to the screw, but it’s like trying to lift a plank of wood by lifting just one end – difficult.

The solution for this, I think, is to run some strings around a series of wheels that guide the strings such that when one end of the Y axis moves (for example), the other end is pulled by the string to keep the beams perpendicular to each other.

So, the first prints I’m doing are holders for the wheels. The prints are really terrible, as the printer is obviously not yet in perfect working order, but after I finish fixing this problem, I can print them again in better quality 🙂