Bajdi.com Website Review

end of last year i decided to build a new 3d printer. at that time i already owned a very cheap chinese prusa i3 printer, it worked, but wasn’t a very reliable machine and it was dead slow. as i did not want to reuse any of the cheap chinese parts of my old printer i decided to build a completely new machine using better parts. my goal was to build a reliable and fast machine. i bought a p3steel chas*is from a spanish webshop, which turned out to be a very good base for a prusa i3 style printer. it’s rock solid, motors with 8mm lead screws for the z-axis. for the hot end i choose the popular e3d v6 for 1.75mm filament, with the bowden addon. several people had recommended i go for a bowden setup if i wanted a fast machine. for the electronics i used the standard arduino mega + ramps setup with marlin firmware. i put it together over several weeks as the various parts arrived. the last part to arrive was the extruder, printing 0.4mm layers with a 0.6mm nozzle is very hard on the extruder. it was time to try out different solutions. i ordered a geared nema17 stepper motor (17hs15-1684s-pg5) on aliexpress and started looking for and it only uses a couple of small bearings which i happened to have in house. this design has a hole pattern to mount standard nema17 motors and geared nema17 stepper motors. it uses a spring to push the idler against the drive gear. the design doesn’t allow you to adjust the spring tension. i didn’t have a spring that was the right length so i modified the body of the extruder so i could use a shorter i needed a new drive gear that i could mount on the 8mm axle of the geared stepper motor. the one i bought didn’t turn out to be a good solution, it wasn’t suited for 1.75mm filament, another fail. it’s the third one in this photo: i never got good results with this extruder because of the big drive gear, it just hadn’t enough grip on the filament. i also came to the conclusion that the geared stepper motor is very slow to retract. i later bought a new drive gear, the 4th one in the above photo. i