spent about 12 hours (with help from my mom) on saturday and sunday getting the printer's mechanical assembly mostly done, plus another 9 or 10 hours yesterday running the belts, following ellis's gantry squaring guide, rerunning the belts, wiring it, and doing initial electronics setup.
followed that up with a light evening of 3 or 4 hours' work tonight setting up the printer display, finishing up toolhead assembly, fixing some silly mistakes I made, and making sure the electronics on the toolhead work with the exception of the hotend itself. hoping to have the printer moving under its own power for the first time tomorrow night or thursday.
tips for future use:
- one voron build is sufficient to give you an instinctive understanding of what the appropriate hex drive size is for a variety of metric fasteners. a head start: M3 button and flat heads are 2mm drive, M3 socket heads are 2.5mm, M5 button and flat heads are 3mm, M5 socket heads are 4mm.
- the voron print-it-forward program does not consider skirts for the electronics bay to be a functional part (except for the short segment holding the power inlet), and the skirts hold on the bottom panel. before you build a voron, either source a full printed part set, or make sure you're prepared to have wiring just kind of chilling out there for as long as it takes you to print a full set of skirts.
- have both a magnetic and a non-magnetic screwdriver on hand, if possible. the non-magnetic screwdriver is useful for helping set T-nuts without yanking them out of the slot.
- cannot emphasize enough how little thread locker you need to lock a set screw. one healthy drop of loctite blue, allowed to run freely, is enough to seize up an entire Z drive assembly within five minutes and make you forcibly disassemble it with a hammer and a cheap screwdriver used as an ersatz punch. if I ever need thread locker again I'm going to buy a thread locker stick.
- [disclaimer: I am not an electrician. as the assembly manual mentions for good reason, you are working with mains electricity, which can kill you if you manage it wrong, especially outside the US. ask an expert if you're in doubt.] if you're wondering how to ground your frame: run an extra T-nut into a channel and bolt the protective earth to it. even if your frame is anodized and non-conductive at the surface, your fasteners aren't, and they scraped off some of the paint under where you clamped them down. the maximum resistance from any of my frame corners to the ground prong on the wall outlet is about 70 ohms, which seems reasonable given that all of the mains-powered parts have their own protective earths as well.
- ellis's gantry squaring guide is invaluable to get a geometrically sound gantry.
- linear rails aren't symmetric front-to-back, and as a result, the Voron Tap linear rail assembly guide is directional. make sure you're inserting it into the rail the right way or else it can bind up and knock out ball bearings.
- not unrelated to the previous point, the assembly manuals are right that you should try to avoid having ball bearings fall out of your linear rail carriages, but it's also not a world-ending catastrophe like they make it sound. just put them back where the ball bearing-sized gap in the appropriate bearing raceway is. you got this.
- if you have problems with the B belt on a voron 2 getting all messed up at the B idler, you might've accidentally run it up into the T-slot on the left gantry extrusion. I found what was helpful here was to unclamp the belt from the left side of the X carriage, pull it out, and run it "backward" through the B idler -- around the left XY joint, then from the extrusion side of the idler inward, the same way as the A idler -- which makes it much harder to make this mistake.
- if you're running a CAN toolhead, even if you think you're smart enough to get away with the docs that come with your parts, don't try. use Esoterical's CAN bus guide.
- bigtreetech's CAN cable comes with power wires terminated in very short bare wire ends. don't let this fool you, you can't power the toolhead off a neighboring heater output on your control board; even if you use a
[static_digital_output]in klipper, it won't be driven high early enough to not make klipper panic because it can't find the MCU. splice extra wire to them and run it over to your 24-volt power supply. - you cannot crimp JST GH terminals without a specialized tool and very fine-gauge wire. if some part of your build requires you to crimp JST GH terminals, you should just buy some pre-terminated wires and splice them to whichever cable needs that termination. (I'm looking at you, bigtreetech.)
