ended up extruder swapping green monster for the LGX Lite that used to be in my old printer, because the Clockwork 2 was still giving me grief. but now this thing works like a dang dream.

this week I finally tracked down the mechanical problem that was giving me infuriating extrusion issues — the clockwork 2 drive assembly shouldn’t be tight against the extruder housing; it should have a little room to rattle around and self-center on the filament and guidler shaft — and actually got green monster printing reliably.

thoughts about this printer in ongoing practical use so far:

• voron tap is cool but has been annoyingly prone to getting thrown off by plastic drool on the nozzle tip. I have to get in there with pliers to clean up the nozzle basically every print.
• if you’re looking for a printer that can do high-speed printing I would probably recommend against the E3D revo unless you’ve got the money to buy both a revo HF nozzle and the 60-watt heater core.
• it’s really a pain to get to the electronics bay on this thing. you definitely want both an ethernet and a USB keystone jack installed, and if you see yourself doing a lot of electronic tinkering I would recommend the trident over the 2.4.

otherwise it’s great! very close to the goal I had when I started this project, which was “build a printer I can hand a g-code file and walk away from secure in the knowledge that it will successfully summon an Object.”

this week I finally tracked down the mechanical problem that was giving me infuriating extrusion issues — the clockwork 2 drive assembly shouldn’t be tight against the extruder housing; it should have a little room to rattle around and self-center on the filament and guidler shaft — and actually got green monster printing reliably.

thoughts about this printer in ongoing practical use so far:

• voron tap is cool but has been annoyingly prone to getting thrown off by plastic drool on the nozzle tip. I have to get in there with pliers to clean up the nozzle basically every print.
• if you’re looking for a printer that can do high-speed printing I would probably recommend against the E3D revo unless you’ve got the money to buy both a revo HF nozzle and the 60-watt heater core.
• it’s really a pain to get to the electronics bay on this thing. you definitely want both an ethernet and a USB keystone jack installed, and if you see yourself doing a lot of electronic tinkering I would recommend the trident over the 2.4.

otherwise it’s great! very close to the goal I had when I started this project, which was “build a printer I can hand a g-code file and walk away from secure in the knowledge that it will successfully summon an Object.”

it turns out when the assembly manual tells you to follow these blue arrows, you need to be very careful to actually do that instead of following the red arrow

if you follow the red arrow, it turns out that what can happen is that the print head will move normally and the printer works fine for like three or four days -- until the surface texture of either the belt or the little plastic nub you routed it around changes enough to seize the machine up and make it skip steps

either way, after rerunning the belts (again) it seems to work normally, so that's a relief