Testing out the E3D Chimera hot end on the Tevo Tarantula pro!

So this is like the third one of these that I've printed. I think I got things a lot more dialed in. The first one was pretty rough. You look at this guy, I know it's hard to see. Let me adjust the light here. You can see that it was totally overextruding on the yellowish green color and underextruding on the white color. So I made some adjustments to the e-steps and you can see this one is a lot better. I was still having a couple of issues, so I re-sliced the file. Took my retraction away completely and I think this is the best result that I've gotten so far. But we are back to doing another calibration test print just to do a little further testing and dial things in a little bit more. I think we're pretty much almost there. So we'll see here in a few minutes when it starts putting down the white, if that works well. It says in the settings not to do retraction more than two millimeters, so I started off with that and then backed it off. The reason is because when it retracts, it pulls it up into the tube and it can cause jams and I did have a couple problems like that. But again, user error, just not having the right settings. So I dialed that in and we are pretty much golden since then. It's just a matter of flow rates and things like that. I do have two different extruders on here and I actually had never set the e-steps for two different extruders in Marlin before separately and they weren't working at the same e-steps. It was getting really, really choppy results. So things are a little bit better now and I think we might have to make another minor adjustment to the green and increase the flow just a little bit. But not bad. Yeah, so far both nozzles are working good. The white should kick on here in just a second. It's almost done with the green and then we'll make sure that it's still running. I haven't really had any clogs yet with the retraction turned off. Cross your fingers. Although I did have some problems with the fan not turning on right away. So I've been going in and doing it manually because I can't get my Cura settings to for some reason turn it on right away. I have it set to first layer, but it just won't. And that caused some heat creep up into here which caused the filament to get all stringy and not want to extrude. Other than that, that was a pretty easy adjustment to make. It should switch to white right about now as soon as it's done with this last little square. It might go around the inner circle one more time too. The extenders, what do you mean the extenders? And there it's starting to flow pretty decent with the white. So it looks like both extruders are working. Hopefully this will be the best model yet. We'll print it out and see. How's the lighting? I guess you can kind of see the color change. I should have picked a more high contrasting color set than I think to print with. And this thing was actually pretty easy to put together. Little under extrusion there. So, oh, see and my fan turned off. So I'm starting to get that heat creep I was talking about. Okay, so I'm actually going to pause this real quick. And once it starts to get hot and keeps pushing in there, the end just gets too fat to go through the hole in the Chimera. It's kind of a pain, but that's one of those things where I just got to figure out what's shutting my fan off. That is a settings thing. And it doesn't help that I haven't put the part cooling fans back on. There are two part cooling fans, obviously, for this giant hot end. And right now I only have the fan on for the radiator there that does not want to go in here. Let's try that again. All right, now we're going to have a blob there. But I think, most of it anyway, resume print. There we go, it's starting to flow again. That blob's going to get in the way later. Yeah, if I get the fan not to shut off, I'd be very, very happy. Oh yeah, I'll change them to be the same extruder. I actually had two of the same ones on here. This was the original tarantula one and it pretty much matched this one exactly, but I broke the arm off during one of those jams I was talking about. So I'll just have to print another one of those. Probably use one of the other printers to do it just until I get this guy figured out. And then I'll put that one back on here. This one came off of the Ender 3. And that one's got a metal extruder on it too. So I don't know, I kind of like, it's interesting because it's like the same NEMA 17 motor. So it's obviously a difference in the gears and the teeth that changes the E-steps, it's weird. Okay there, now it's starting to go down pretty nice. Don't recommend cutting parts off of your print while you're printing, but that's going to get in the way later. Blobs are a really big problem. That's one of the problems I was having when it was over extruding because the one nozzle would run into the other one and it just wouldn't work right. It would cause it to bow and bend and then it would print in the wrong spot and it was getting uglier and uglier. Normally with 3D printing with one nozzle, if you have a little bump, it'll correct itself. But with more than one nozzle, it seems to just accentuate the problem. Seems to be going pretty nicely though. Let me see if I can reduce a little of that glare. We're still printing in white. This thing's only a couple layers thick. It takes about 25 minutes to print the whole thing. So depending on how long this stream takes, maybe we'll throw another one on after I update some more settings, but we'll see here in a minute. Looks like we are back on the yellow. Is the yellow extruding? Fan is still on, that's good. We are extruding, okay. Even though we had a little hiccup there, this may still be the best one yet. We'll see. I'm just kind of hanging out at the moment. We'll let this run for a minute. On this one, no, there's no bed leveling on this guy. So I did it all manually. The nice thing about the Chimera is after you get everything kind of situated and then you do your hot tighten, you can raise and lower, just like the Ender 3, the throat, and get it right where you want it. So they're pretty close to as level as they're gonna get by me eyeballing it pretty much. There are some other tools you can use to get them more even but I don't have those on hand, but there are several other calibration tests I can run to make sure everything's as close as I can get it as well. So this is the first test that I'm running. I will do some other prints as well. And you can see those in the assembly video when it comes out, but right now, yeah. I've been recording a ton of videos and haven't really put much out because I haven't had the time to edit them with all the stuff that I've been doing, running all the printers at once. So there's probably gonna be a big storm of videos coming soon. Hopefully people find them interesting. Got the FL Sun Q5 Delta and the ET4X, which is actually a big improvement over the ET4. And then I don't know if you can see kind of here back in the corner, this guy. Yeah, that's my first resin printer. I'm waiting for the resin to get here. Hopefully it's soon. It's supposed to be today. It doesn't look like it's gonna be today. Looks like it might be tomorrow if UPS feels like, feels like going out and about that day. I appreciate that. I've also been trying not to put out too much crap. So that's one of the reasons I wanna kind of take my time with more editing. If we do more of the impromptu live streaming like this, that's cool. But I think I got like skin color and gray. I just got a couple of colors, so. And then I do have some more samples that are on their way for reviews, but I have no idea when those will get here because I don't really get tracking numbers half the time for that stuff. It'd be really nice if UPS would just show up right now. We could turn on the resin printer too. I do have a few more things I need to do before I can just take it on and start printing. I can give you a little better look though. Don't mind the mess, but yeah, there it is sitting back there next to my wounded Ender 3 that's now missing a motor and an extruder. And another thing that's interesting about this is like this is super cheap eBay filament that I got. I think I got like 20 pounds for like 50 bucks. So it was like really kind of crappy. Very surprised that it actually is printing as well as it is, but I have gotten some decent prints from it off of some of my other printers. I'll show you a closeup of this when it's done, but you can't really see it from there, but there's a little bit of misalignment here where the white is going into the green and then there's a little bit larger gap than there should be there. So I don't know if I mispositioned it in the slicer slightly, or if that's just something that I need to adjust as far as my alignment goes, my distance between nozzles. Yeah, Tevo definitely blew me away when I first got it. The thing is, is like my other printers had been pre-assembled and this was the first kit printer I got, so I was kind of surprised with how well it went together. But it was my favorite for a while too, for sure, out of all this. I think I'll take this over the Ender 3 or the A-Nets, but that Delta I just got, man, the detail on that thing is like amazing. This was a little mini I printed off of the Delta and you can see like every little detail in there. So I think I'm kind of sold on checking out some more Delta printers, for sure. I guess we'll compare the quality of that to the resin printer when it comes out, but it shouldn't be anywhere near close, seeing as how this thing will print down to like five microns or some crap like that. It's ridiculous, the resolution on it. It looks like we are just about halfway there on the progress bar, but it says 15 minutes, so there should be about seven minutes left in this print, which would put us two thirds of the way done, which I guess kind of makes sense, I don't know. It looks like we're getting pretty close. Like I said, this is a super thin model. It's only a couple of layers. It's more for making sure that stuff lines up on top of it, so. Yeah, I actually haven't tried to do that with any of these. I would love to. I was actually talking to E3D about that when I got this from them, which they were cool enough to just send me, but the cool thing about the Delta, I think the coolest is that it can make actually really, really accurate holes and circles. The Cartesian machines are great, but a lot of times when you're trying to make an opening and you're trying to make it exact, it's a little bit off in one direction or the other, but the Delta generally nails it. I printed a threaded screw and bolt and it pretty much just hits money. Everything still seems to be flowing correctly, and I think definitely our best one so far. It shouldn't take too much longer. When it comes off, we'll put it next to the other two and kind of compare. Interesting how some of the sides over here get this browning on them as the other hot nozzle passes over them, and again, I'm just setting this up and had to make some adjustments, so I don't have the socks on. The socks need to go back on. I think that would kind of reduce that browning in the filament over there, but so far, I'm pretty impressed with this. I mean, it wasn't too hard to put on. I did have to build the mount, but I think I'll have that available when I'm done. I somehow misplaced the holes, so I have to redo it, and I think I'm gonna make it a little bit thicker so it doesn't wobble as much, but I'll have that up on Thingiverse and MyMiniFactory when it's done for everybody. That arm I printed for this guy here, that's on Thingiverse as well and MyMiniFactory. I try to put them up on both. Everybody bitches about, excuse me, complains about Thingiverse, but I've never actually had it go down, so I used it first, and I tend to use it most, but because a lot of people don't like it, I've started putting things on MyMiniFactory as well. Yeah, it looks pretty good. It looks a lot better in the camera view than it does up close. I'd move the camera, but I don't wanna make anybody sick. Like I said, I'll give you a close-up when it's done. You can see it's a little bit less than perfect, but again, it's just a test print, and we are just starting to calibrate this. You can see that rim around there that it's building up, kind of like a draft shield. That's what they call an ooze shield, and that's kind of keeping some of the other filament as it oozes from dripping onto there. You can see it just deposited a big chunk on the outside there, and that's good. I could also try the pillar approach where it just makes a purge pillar, and I've tried that once, and it worked all right. I haven't tried it since I adjusted my E-step, so I think it'll probably work better now. I have the pieces of it laying around here. Oh, I guess this is my fourth try. I've just found another one that this one didn't work at all. The white wasn't extruding, and then the green was over-extruding, so. I think we've got about two minutes left here. Yeah, I'm anxious to get into some more complicated prints. There are a couple of different websites, like Insight Apps where you can go and paint different parts of the model with different colors of filament, and then export it and slice it, and it'll actually print in two colors or however many you have. There's some pretty interesting settings in Cura for dual extrusion that I wanna be taking a look at. Hello, how's it going? Yeah, we were just talking about how we both, the TiVo's one of our favorite printers for sure. This one's a beast. There's a couple of Facebook groups for TiVo Tarantula Pros, but I don't know any of them on hand. Honestly, the biggest community you can find and the best place to ask questions and stuff like that is probably the 3D Printing Reddit. Yeah, I'm stoked to print some stuff that's larger. Probably gonna run a couple more calibration prints first. I don't wanna go and set something to print and walk away and waste a bunch of filament of two different kinds and just... Of course, I've yet to have a multicolored spaghetti blob, so I mean, that could be fun. I've done it plenty of times with one color. We can kinda see, compare and contrast here. Now, the skirt on this one really sucked, but the model is probably the best other than this one that's printing right now. It looks like I have this front corner here is beginning to lift up from the bed, which is really annoying. See? I'm messing with the camera, so don't freak out. There we go, that's a little bit better as far as seeing the contrasting colors there. Kinda blacks out everything else in the background, but I mean, that's not really what we're looking at, so. If you need help printing PETG, I do have a couple videos about it. I don't do too much on the T-Pro, but it is possible. It's fairly simple and just like any other printer, as long as you follow the same guidelines. Basically, you're gonna want no fan turned on. That's kind of a big part of it. So, we are just about done here. Don't have this printer set up to show the percentage of the print, so it just tells me how much time has gone by, but it is just about to the end, and then we will pull it off the bed and place it next to these other ones. You can kinda see our progress, if we have any. There it is, there's a nice burnt chunk over here. That's lovely. I'm gonna leave those there for just a second. We will see if we can get this off the bed in one piece. You know, this TiVo tarantula bed was like the worst for getting models off at first. Like, it was so sticky. Everything adhered to it, and I couldn't get the pieces off. Now that it's marred up a little bit, it's a lot better, actually. All right, so, I'm actually gonna remove the skirt from this one, because I think it's looking pretty good. And there we have it. As you can see, it's pretty clear difference from the one we started with. Pretty pleased with it, actually. I think we're almost there as far as our settings go, at least as close as we can get with this test print. We'll have to switch it up and print some other ones. But, yeah, that's not bad, not bad at all. Whoops, come back here. If you guys enjoyed watching this, stay tuned, we're gonna have a lot more on the dual extruder coming up. Like I said, this is the Camaro from E3D. It is pretty simple to set up. Dialing in everything else is a little bit more complicated, but not too bad. But I will go through it, step by step for everybody, eventually. Right now, I'm kinda still working things out for myself, and once I know what to do, I will let you know what to do, and we will make another video specifically on that. So, yeah, I like it. I think it looks pretty good, too. I'm not, I'm a little concerned with that one end that started lifting up, but as I said, the skirt quality wasn't that great. I think that has something to do with, as you can see, as it begins to switch, it has a little bit of a problem with flow immediately, and it takes a second to kick in. So that, I think, might be something to do with the cooling and heating of the hot end and the fan, just like that other issue we were having. So I think this would've turned out a little bit nicer if we hadn't of jammed up the white in that one spot when the fan shut off, but I'm gonna go and investigate my Kira settings. I think I'll replace the socks now, and I will be back with plenty more videos for you guys soon. Thanks for stopping by. I know this was kinda short. I gotta go make dinner for the kids, so Technerus out.