This topic contains 10 replies, has 3 voices, and was last updated by Robson 2 days, 5 hours ago.
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Can you describe in a little more detail what exactly the issue is? You have not included enough detail to enable troubleshooting.
What I am interpreting from your statement is that one of the two silver guide rails that the head carrier slides back and forth on, the X axis, is loose and will move vertically a large amount on the left side and the left side only. I am guessing this is the upper of the two rails, though I am uncertain.
Thank you.
I am not affiliated with CEL; I operate two Betas and one Production Robox.@robson You may not have a faulty unit, you may just be seeing the anti-backlash device in the Z axis. There is a spring that maintains the tension in the Z axis and will allow vertical motion on both sides up to about 50mm. It should move down again as soon as pressure is removed and should take significant force to move.
I am not affiliated with CEL; I operate two Betas and one Production Robox.@robson Yes, it looks like your machine was damaged during shipping. The piece you see missing is the connection between the Z axis screw and the X-axis gantry. I would either send the unit back or request replacement parts from CEL. The replacement isn’t that hard; it would only take about an hour at the most.
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This reply was modified 3 days, 20 hours ago by
BHudson.
I am not affiliated with CEL; I operate two Betas and one Production Robox.@bhudson: mine has some play even pushing it downwards (albeit much lesser than going upwards), is it normal? Sure it doesn’t look at all capable of doing precise drilling/milling work, some day (especially if the Z probe remains as is, i.e. bends the head under load). This is the video I made an posted long ago, and although only the right Z is shown, it does the same in the left one as well (at least the symmetry makes me feel good).
@robson: I can understand you. I paid my Robox in November, got it about one month and half ago, but I still haven’t been able to make one single print with it. Still waiting for a replacement head since 2 weeks ago. It’s like a neverending story.
Meanwhile I have noticed that the aluminum bed is heavily concave and not even in a regular curve way.. not just the PEI is bend (which is, too) but also the thick aluminum bed is.
It was the latter that distorted the PEI, they are concave in the same way. I will ask CEL permission to dismount it, to bring it to a friend who has the means to 3D height map it, but we’re talking about 0.5-0.6mm of concavity in the center vs the sides (not even too extreme sides), and I only checked the X line at the Y center so far, but it looks like bed distortion is even higher at the Y extremes. The new v1.01.01 bed correction isn’t able to compensate this huge concavity, and anyway I wouldn’t want to print objects curved at the center for 0.5-0.6mm’s, as I intend to make precise (remember the advertised 20 microns precision) mechanical pieces. A big raft could possibly work but then again my aluminum bed is heavily concave and it shouldn’t be.So it means that when I get head/PEI replacement, my printer will still not work, unless I use only the very center of the bed and align the nozzle height carefully. I don’t want to sound unpleasant, but a 30mm x 30mm printer is not what I have paid for and am still waiting since last November.
I too had bought 11 filaments, it would be hard (and expensive, as I’d have to ship them from Italy) to return everything and get all the money back. It would even be a total failure then, as I haven’t carefully chosen a printer (basing only on believing that published specifications and advertisement were true, which they must be anyway) wasted 40+ hours troubleshooting it, to then return back like if nothing was ever happened. At this point money back wouldn’t compensate me. As I have the means to repair it myself, and make it 50 hours of my time troubleshooting it vs 40 made so far, at this point doesn’t change much, I want to see if CEL is committed to making this DOA printer work as intended or not.
Regards.
@robson I am happy to help whenever possible. I hope that you do get a good printer and please let me know if you want help getting it set up. There are a couple of things that I have found through my experience that may help you start printing faster.
@omega64 My printers show the same vertical motion as your video. This is due to the way the anti-backlash mechanism works. Please keep in mind that I am not associated with CEL but I have three printers and have run well over 300 hours of printing, half of that on a production printer just like yours. To address your concerns:
1. The warped bed is within the ability of the system to compensate. I have mapped my bed and it shows the same variation between the center and the edges: .5 to .6 mm. I designed, printed, and used my own mapping device that did not require the disassembly of the Robox; it rides on the head carrier and uses a standard dial indicator to precisely map the contours of the bed. You need to set your nozzle offset to between .15 and .25 in order to print large parts. I have printed several electronics enclosures that filled almost the entire print volume and they completed just fine and are not warped. My PEI bed also warped, I removed it and flipped it over. It has been perfect ever since. As I said before, this printer has run over 150 hours of prints with no trouble. I have not had to replace any parts or do any maintenance once I received a replacement head.
2. There was a batch of heads that had faulty seals from what I am seeing on the forums and my own experience. My production printer had faulty seals and they blew out after about 10 hours of printing. It took two months to get a new head because the faulty batch is pulling so many out of production that they can’t keep up with the new sales orders and still provide replacements. CEL is doing their best to keep everyone happy. That being said, you didn’t mention why you needed a new head. If it is due to faulty seals, I suggest politely asking for an update on the status of your head. CEL may have thought they already dealt with your problem. They have had multiple new people start and as such there have been a couple of tickets of mine that were dropped. A polite request for an update and they jumped right on it. If your ticket has been closed, re-open it and ask for an update and you should receive it.
3. You said that you have not been able to get a single print completed. Is this because of the blown seals on the head or due to some other reason? Looking at your past comment history, it seems to me that your head may not have been faulty. I have had several heads fail the nozzle opening calibration and only one of them ended up being faulty. The rest of them have gone on to print hours of successful prints. In all of these cases, the fault was either with the material or with an error that I had made. In all cases, recalibrating the nozzle with good quality filament solved my issues. I use ColorFabb filament almost exclusively now because it is reliable in all three of my printers where the CEL PLA is not reliable in the older printers and ABS is reliable but smells bad.
4. You mentioned in one of your previous posts that your machine had not been tested. If you remember, your machine shipped with a plastic clip on its rails. This clip was printed by your machine as a test run. That means your printer was tested at the factory and calibrated. That clip takes about 20 minutes to print and, except for the faulty seals on the head, will reveal a faulty machine. So either your machine was damaged in transit, which you should have been able to find and report on delivery, or the recalibration you performed was not correct. Again, I have had three Robox machines delivered to me, one handled by UPS, one by DHL and one by China Post and the US Postal Service. All three have been delivered in good condition and have been printing within two hours of being delivered. I know that some units have been damaged in transit as Robson’s second unlucky unit was. My belief is that these are not common and that CEL has developed good packaging. So maybe your calibration wasn’t correct and that is the cause of the problem. One thing I have seen with calibrations is that you must perform a full material purge before calibrating the head. This cleans out the old material and makes sure that you have new material in the head and ready to print. Then you perform the calibration. If you don’t succeed the first time, do it again. There are also some points where the nozzles don’t close completely during normal operation. These are mostly in the calibration sequence.
5. The Robox is capable of precision printing. I have had successful prints that are 25 mm long and 10 mm wide with details less than 5 mm thick. Videos have been posted of 20 micron layer thickness prints. The success of precision prints is going to depend on the settings and on the material. PLA and ABS are not good for detail prints. PET and filled PLA are very good for detail prints. You have to choose your material and your settings depending on what you need out of the results. Just like a CNC program, you need to adjust the settings for what you are making. There are hundreds of forums and sites with how to print different objects; sometimes you need to do a little research into what you want to do and go at it from a preparation angle and not just expect the printer to spit out perfect units as soon as you get it unpacked. Your CNC machines need leveling and your tooling wears out. You have to compensate for these normal issues. 3D printers have their own needs and you need to know what those are in order to get perfect prints. Once you understand how to design your parts and what settings and materials to use, you can produce perfect prints every time. Until then you will be disappointed.
6. Future expansion of the Robox may include milling and drilling. This will be on a small scale and will not be capable of hogging out material. I envision cutting traces on circuit boards, milling plastic or wood, or aluminum for detail work. The Robox head carrier you are using is designed for 3D printing and a milling head will eliminate the Z probe operation. I don’t know how they plan to do milling from this gantry design, but I know that CEL is more than capable of making a design that will work. It will not be quick, though, I expect two to three years before a milling add-on head hits the market. They are currently working on a dual-extrusion head and a new design for the print head to address some of the quality issues that have been identified.
7. As far as your time; this is a new product and compared to many of the 3D printers I have heard of, has much more capability and much better performance. This comes with more complexity and more problems. At least the machine doesn’t fail and require new parts after 80 hours of printing like one of the printers out there now that have been under development for three times as long as Robox. I have spent many, many hours working on my Robox units because I bought Beta units. I have spent about 10 hours on the production printer doing maintenance and calibration. Right now if I want to start a print on the production printer I will just go and let it be because all the hours I have spent learning how to use the machine and developing my profiles, etc. mean that the unit is working perfectly. But I also didn’t expect it to print everything perfectly out of the box, I knew that I needed to learn how to run the machine and how to design the parts and choose the filament. All of that information I have shared on the forums as best I am able.
I am more than happy to help anyone who needs it if they are clear about their needs and willing to do basic troubleshooting. I spend at least an hour a day on this forum, most of it helping people with one question or another. I will do test prints for you and provide design support for your models if you ask for it. Just keep a positive attitude and treat me, CEL, and everyone else on this forum with respect. I don’t have time for negative attitudes.
I am not affiliated with CEL; I operate two Betas and one Production Robox.Hello Ben,
You wrote a lot of points - many assuming wrong things unfortunately, like if I wasn’t able to do even basic stuff, while I’m an engineer and I have designed 2 milling machines in the past (and a lot of other stuff, mostly electronic boards and automation hardware and software) - and I could answer your points one by one, but I don’t want to escalate any polemic that I may appear to have started.
I don’t need your help at all: I just need working hardware.
I see you’re advocating CEL, which is fine, perhaps thinking I’m attacking them excessively. I’m not, for example about the extruder I have clearly said that it’s working well and gave me no problems whatsoever.
I’m just a customer who has paid a product in November and still can’t use it, and February is coming soon.
If it works (even with some months of delay) I’m happy in the end, if it doesn’t I’m not.
I hope you don’t blame me for this, you are a happy customer (lucky you, and I’m glad you are) and you hardly can understand my feelings. If you had 3 faulty printers you sure would.
Regards.
Fabio -
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