Velleman K8200 3D Printer (Part 3)

I didn't have much time lately to continue this report, but now I did so here it continues. Next part in building the printer was constructing the frame. It is made of clever aluminum struts held together by 90 degree angled clamps. I never saw this stuff before, but it is really cool you can build anything with this I guess. Tricky part is you really need to read the manual here since you have to insert some square nuts in there that you will need later.

After that you insert the X/Y carriage that was constructed before. Aligning is a careful job as well. It has to be positioned very well. The cool thing is after this you are able to move it around and get a sense of what it will be like when it is printing. I was quite happy that everything seemed to move very smoothly so I could go on to the next part. Down side is now that it is getting quite a large piece to work on so I had to continue my work on the floor.

Then you start building your way up. These two assemblies on the left and right will eventually move the print extruder assembly up and down. So this is for the Z movement. On the left is another motor with a long piece of threaded material attached the drives an embedded bolt. On top you have to apply quite some force to screw on a lock tight bolt. It is quite difficult to hold it all. You have to be especially careful not the damage the thread since it will make smooth movement problematic later on.

And the last part is to install another piece of aluminum strut on top to hold everything together. I didn't follow the manual here on purpose. The bar is supposed to go lower with a bracket on top, but I thought it didn't look as nice and I preferred to mount it like this. I could not think of any problem this would create since the whole construction was still rock solid. And it really necessary I could always change this later on. So far so good. Everything still running smoothly also by turning the motor for the Z movement. It is really starting to look like a real machine already :)