Melxlxtreme R1

Melxlxtreme R1 Specs

The project started as a 1 meter Cartesian Cube. But for easy transportation around the house, I had to reduce the printer width to 83 cm from 1 meter. 

Printer details can be found below ;






THE DRAGON VASE

The dragon vase is the first overnight print of Melxlxtreme R1. The printer continously printed for 22:30 hours without any issues such as nozzle clog, under extrusion, power failure, wrapping, or any other problems.

The print consumed over 65 meters of 1.75mm filament which weighs around 206 grams.

The vase has 152mm height with 115mm diameter

and 9mm wall thickness.

The First Print

The very first print was pretty much disappointing resulting in a ball of plastic goop. This was a result of inexperience in 3D Printing as it requires a lot of calibration and printing experience which were solved in the next few weeks as mels continuous trial and error with different parameters in slicing software and as well as hardware configurations.

The Z banding

The Z Banding started to appear on the prints. During the early stages this wasnt an issue as the focus was on calibrating the printer and not the surface quality. But once the calibration was completed, Mels learned that by tweaking the slicer settings, the Z banding can be reduced. So it is not a hardware issue from the printer. It is also noticed that the use of different filament gave different quality with Z banding ranging from medium to higher. Another factor is that the climate with rain and moisture effected the print quality depending on the day. Both the issues were solved later with better surface quality and consistent layers.

As more and more prints were done, Mels learned to tweak the settings further and improve the quality beyond what was ever predicted from a wooden printer.

GALE CRATER

The Gale Crater in Mars was printed to explore the martian surface and explore the possibilities of setting up a 3D printer on a terrain like this as Mel believes in a martian colony in the near future. To push the limits of possibilities and face new challenges to seek more knowledge as failure opens new possibilities and innovations.

20mm Cube infront of vase

Big Vase Bottom

 The biggest vase printed upto date has an amazing 27 cm width by 20 cm height with just 0.4 mm thickness, which shows how precise the printer can print without any gaps or underextrusion.  The Big vase was one of the first print using Red filament, A lot more tunings and calibrations were done with future prints  as you can see in the other prints with red filament.

MELXLXTREME GCODE

START GCODE

G21 ; Millimeter units

G90 ; Absolute XYZ

G28 ; Home all axes

G1 Z5 F100 ; Z raise

M109 S240 ; Wait for nozzle temp

G92 E0 ; Reset extruder distance

G1 F2000 E10

M106 P0 S20

M117 Melxlxtreme Active

G1 X140 Y170 E5 F1550 ; move to start

G1 Z-0.19 F1200 ; Move to layer height


END GCODE

G91 ; Relative position

G1 E-12 F1300 ; Retract 12mm at 1300mm speed

G0 Z4 F2000 ; fast move z +4

M104 S0 ; Turn off nozzle heater

G90 ; Absolute Position

G28Y ; Home Y

M84 ; Disable steppers

M300 P250 S262

M300 P25 S0

M300 P250 S330

M300 P172 S0

M300 P184 S311

M300 P250 S415

M300 P180 S0

M300 P256 S233

M300 P250 S349

M300 P184 S0

M300 P250 S262