Mods I made to the Rapide Lite and why

[Broome]

Some improvements that I made.

Extruder:
I took the extruder apart and flipped the pulley wheel (feeder wheel). Now I can just push in the filament really easy no fiddling at all. Grip is good and it has been working flawlessly for a couple of weeks with long prints. See post in

Levelled bed:
I found that the rattling and noise of the bed was annoying so I made use of a tip that I got from the forum about the welleman printer. I also had problems with leveling the bed so the use of a mirror as suggested in the forum was perfect. I bought a 20x20 cm mirror, replaced the screws on the heated bed with the hex screw ones and screwed them all to the bottom until the springs gave some real tension. I used paper clips to fasten the mirror and did a manual leveling of every corner and the center of the mirror by unscrewing the hex screws. Flat and silent!

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Adhesion:
This was mainly because I ruined my kapton tape and again I followed suggestions from other forums with painters tape. I used tesa 4334 since I have found it to work extremely well of masking on my paintings, so I have a lot of it. I then use a gluestick as an extra binding.

Filament feeder.
I simply drilled a hole in the shelf so now it flows completely free from above. Have not had any problems since.

I am driving at speed 100 mm/ sec and it is actually the fans that makes the most noise now. And as an added bonus my moire pattern is almost non existent.

Thomas

[JonatanJacobsson]

Nice mods!
How did you silent the bed rattling?

[bolsoncerrado]

I guess he solved it by adding the mirror, the extra weight made any ratling to go away...

I'm not feeling confident in adding extra layers of stuff like glass or mirror though... Once i set up RapidePi, I'll probably move the printer to another room... Working with that level of noise is quite annoying, and rattling does not make that much difference as fans do...

[Skinny Kid]

Well done. Newer versions of the extruder have been altered so you cannot remove the L arm and flip the pulley. Found this out yesterday. Do you find you lose heat on the bed with the mirror?

[Broome]

@jonatan, I screwed the hex stews all the way down and then released them about half a turn each when I leveled the bed.
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@bolsoncerrado, I think it was actually the tightening of the screws were the issue. I do agree with you on the fans though. That is my next project.

@Skinny kid, it has not affected my prints at all, I have no heat meter here so I guess I just go with what works. Does the extruder work now, is it aligned? If so good work Rapide team, otherwise really bad. I sent them emails explaining the problem, but I guess you know what they did. So if you have time take a picture, I ordered a new one from them.

Thomas

[Fixx]

Well done. Newer versions of the extruder have been altered so you cannot remove the L arm and flip the pulley. Found this out yesterday. Do you find you lose heat on the bed with the mirror?

What are the newer version of extuder? Can you share the pictures or other specifications?

[Leon]

Hi i got a question, i was using a level and leveled the bed perfectly, but when i move the extruder on each side they still dont touch the bed equally. Anybody face this issue?

[BobenhamHotspur]

Hi i got a question, i was using a level and leveled the bed perfectly, but when i move the extruder on each side they still dont touch the bed equally. Anybody face this issue?

It appears the aluminium bed is not totally flat hence why the extruder is at different heights at different places

[Broome]

If you have the hex screws it is easy to just pull the extruder to the corners and then adjust every corner screw so that you get an equal space, use a paper or something (look at Justins video). The problem I had was that my bed was a little higher in the middle, thus the mirror.

[milstream]

Leveling the bed with a level does not level it relative to the motion of the axis. To do that, all axis rails would need to be perfectly level.