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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • 31 days of perfect health and then drop dead? Or 31 days of slow, debilitating, crushing agony and pain and then death? I just lost my best friend to perotineal cancer, from diagnosis to her passing was 97 days. She made plans to travel with her daughter, spend time with friends, write a will, etc. but she ended up spending a majority of that time in the hospital on heavy duty narcotics and offer her nut because of them. I don’t think anyone would plan on spending their last 31 days like that but it’s more realistic.

    Tldr: do the things you would do with news like this now… Don’t wait until it might be impossible.


  • It’s easy to get out of hand when modding your printer. When I first got my tronxy in 2017 or 2018 the only planned mod was to put a duet 2 clone in instead of the garbage chitu control board. But the extruder sucked as well. Clone slice mosquito fixed that. Then I realized the extruder drive had a 700mm Bowden to the print head, and I wanted to print fast, so I asked Santa (my wife) for a zesty nimble (this was years before the orbiter direct drive). I had 3 vslot wheels disintegrate in a week and voron was using a cheap but high quality linear rails so why not? Then I built a couple of industrial kit printers for a friend, modix and raise3d. They weren’t much more complicated then what I had, and I’m learning some cad so I designed a quad z system with rails and smooth rods like the modix. I had another fried edm machine part of the z sleds. It was so over engineered that I needed to put a bed worthy enough in top and that was the 400mm 3/8" thick tool plate. A heater to match, 400mm ac bed topped with 1/4’ borosilicate glass.

    This took time over several years. I would grab my z motion control and publish it somewhere because it’s pretty simple but very effective.

    Anyway… It has been a lot more fun and educational modding the printer then making silly doodads and fidget toys with it for sure.


  • Perfect! I will read through the site for some insight.

    I didn’t change the extruder, I just changed the driving motor. There is the chance of backlash because of the way the drive cable works. I suppose it could be wearing out … or I am getting a lot of back pressure in the mot end causing it to slip. I plan on taking apart the nimble and replacing the bearings and relubing everything tonight or tomorrow. Plus a pid tube, if I am running too cold or something. Duet has changed their pid model several times and I haven’t retuned it in several firmware upgrades



  • I got the zesty nimble v2 as a Christmas present about 6 months after it came out and loved it right away. It is a remote direct drive extruder. It weights almost nothing and I can print pretty fast. Unfortunately zesty tech seems to have gone out of business. I had a beating on the worm gear go bad once… Maybe it has happened again as well… I think I have some extra beatings lying around so maybe I will swap them out again as well, in case it is getting hung up internally or something.




  • I do use a micrometer to measure, tho not a super .expensive one … I have found it to be pretty precise

    The zesty nimble is crazy gear reduction. On 16x micro stepping on a 200 steps per rev you start tuning at 1800 steps per mm. The gear ratio is 30:1. Because of so many steps per mm I have my extruder motor running at 525 milliamps… It really does effect extrusion, per recommendations. I can go lower if I raise my printing temp but then I get stringing. Anyway…

    I designed my own bed movement using 4 linear rails and z-screws and it was suggested to me that the spring couplets maybe causing the issue. I ordered 4 solid couplers to see if it is a backlash issue.