After surprisingly not too much tinkering, I was able to get a full 132 layer print working on my newly assembled Velleman K8200 3D Printer! Assembly took around 3-4 days and then another day or so calibrating and configuring. You can see in my previous video after I had finished assembly, I instantly loaded up a ‘2016’ model just to see what would happen. The Z axis wasn’t calibrated correctly and the motors seemed to be skipping, causing the print to shift down and to the left. I have a 10 foot usb extension cord to connect to my computer so I tried moving the printer closer to my workstation to see if that was the issue – it wasn’t. I had also read that the printer might not play well with Windows 10. I booted up an old laptop with Windows 7 but had no such luck. Finally after going through the manual a good 5-6 times I realized I never calibrated the motor controllers to the correct voltage. Using my handy-dandy digital multimeter I fine-tuned each of the motor controllers to about .50V. The recommended voltage is 0.425V but I had read that a lot of K8200 owners tuned theirs to about 0.55V, so I went somewhere in the middle. After all of them were set I loaded up another print and….

(Z Motor Holder)

While it’s not the greatest quality, I’m really excited that it printed at all. After all, a week or so ago it was a pile of pieces in the corner of my bedroom. I ran out of the sample blue filament so I changed out to some spare black PLA I had sitting around. The print used all of the default settings that Velleman provided in their tutorial:

Extruder – 190 C

Bed – 60 C

30% honeycomb infill

.5mm nozzle

.3mm layer height

One of the walls on the motor holder snapped off when I was trying to remove the print from the bed. I used glass over the headed bed but the initial testing showed the prints were still not sticking 100% so I put blue painters tape over the glass and used a glue stick to put a thin layer of glue on the tape. This worked a little too well and took quite a bit of effort to get the print off the bed! I can’t wait to start upgrading the supports to get better prints out of this machine. I am in the process of adding a camera gimbal, lights for the extruder, and an Octopi server and will post again when I have everything up and running.

Thanks for viewing!