My very first 3D printer is a Prusa. In the photo was the proof of concept for Vegas Pay LLC. They are custom poker chips that serve as both the playing pieces and the wager in a variant of Texas Holdem game. Each game piece is a cryptocurrency wallet with the private key encapsulated, as shown in the middle view. The two chips on the bottom are real poker chips.
I am very excited to find snapmaker. I am feeling this will be my next purchase. I want to use snapmaker to print clones of my Prusa. I will need a second printer to construct modified Prusa clones and tool them into a farm design.
Making poker chips is not best on an oversized print bed. I don’t want them to be arranged like cookies on a baking sheet. Rather, I want them only one or two at a time on smaller print beds. Hot ends, not print bed capacities, are the goal.
I think snapmaker looks like what I could use to design a Prusa clone print farm. I expect I might be asking alot of strange questions in this community. I’ll try to keep my dumb questions under this thread where they don’t pollute and annoy others in different areas of the community.
Flatness Question:
What are some methods that snapmaker community can suggest to achieve the best possible flatness of 3D print beds?
-Octoprint weather map test point measurements
I never made any good prints on my Prusa until I made my bed read +/- 0.04mm with Octoprint. I manually and tediously used nylock nuts up from the underside to replace standoffs that were part of the original build. Opinions? Thank you
-Can the milling tool be used in a way that achieves a 3D print bed with perfect flatness?
If you want the absolute flattest possible bed, the general advice is to replace the stock bed with a sheet of glass. This means also making some adjustments to how you go about levelling the bed, since the Snapmaker autolevel sensor can’t detect glass.
However, if part of what you’re looking to do is print more printers, you’re better off looking into reprap (even if you decide not to use a reprap design, it will give you a better idea of what you’re getting into and what the limitations of this approach are—what parts you can print, which you’ll have to purchase, and so on).
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My original printer is a Prusa with steel plate, It is down right now because my magnets have been shaking loose and I didn’t realize for a long time. I will need to catch up on the learning curve to using glass beds. And it looks like the community has resources who have demonstrated how to do so.
I think I misspoke. What I meant to say was levelling, not flatness. I know there is auto leveling correction with a mesh correction that is applied to the g-code. Prusa has that, too. I used Octoprint weather map on Prusa. I had nylocks up from the underside instead of using the standoffs. It took hours to get +/- 0.04mm. Now I need to do it again after returning the loose magnets where they go.
So I guess where I would go from installing a glass bed is to explore a way the carving module can be used to tediously skim the printing area. Clean those high spots off. Then lower the bit the smallest amount and run the full length of the printing area again, hitting even more high spots. Repeat until there is flatness and leveling achieved.
I’m asking some resources I have. I believe no other 3D printer could support such a method to reach flatness and leveling because no other printer has the potential capability to mill the high spots from the installed print bed.
My understanding is that good glass is very uniformly flat—there are no high points for the levelling software to compensate for. At most, the bed might display a slight constant slope.
One thing you should be aware of is that the Snapmaker’s CNC function is mostly for wood and other relatively soft materials—the frame isn’t rigid enough to mill anything hard at a reasonable speed. It isn’t meant to be used to level the bed, which would have to be done by working on the aluminium frame underneath. Like any multifunction device, the Snapmaker is a thing of compromises.
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Failure to perform leveling from the underside frame would create extra work. But even after that step, I expect there will still be a tolerance of high and low areas. I found a glass etching bit that doesn’t even require rotation. It can probably reveal the high spots simply by passing over them. After that, maybe a polishing end can be put in the collet. Using various grits of diamond paste and some drops of water can polish the surface down.
I used to do that for samples that were to be examined under an electron microscope. There could be a polishing approach with various grits of diamond paste.
Of course there can’t be water flying out of control. But a good pass with a diamond tip etching tool will leave marks on the high areas and will not touch the low areas… Polishing out those marks means you removed high areas. IF you performed the passes with the diamond to etch as the bed was heated, the polishing can be performed when the bed is unheated.
