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Having owned dozens of 3d printers over the years, the CR-10 has quickly become my favorite and I’m working on converting my fleet over to it as fast as I can. Of course it’s not quite perfect, But with these modifications, some printed some purchased. You can get pretty darn close to the ideal 3d printer. So here are the 10 mods? I personally use on my fleet of Cr-10s here on 3d PC. [MUSIC] Number 10 the USB clamp, the USB cable doesn’t hold particularly well. So I made this simple arm to hold it in place. It works exactly as you’d expect. Number Nine. The beard saver. It does a good job, keeping any facial hair, stubble or skin from getting caught in the y-axi’s belt, but it also has another use identifying your printers quickly just by assigning them A color number eight TL smoothers. If I’m printing very quickly, I can start to get salmon skin on my prints, so I plopped in TL smoother’s getting a four pack for dirt cheap. Do take note that you’ll either need a set with adhesive backing, or you’ll need some electrical tape because you cannot let these touch the walls of the control box. It’ll short out. I applied two layers of tape since the ends were semi-sharp. I also only put the smoothers on the X and y axes holding these two prints together that were printed much too quickly. The effect is exaggerated. So you can see the difference better. The very top of the print on the right that doesn’t have any salmon skin was just dropping the speed 10 percent, taking a look at the extruder gears. You can see how the material just disappears at these higher speeds, but the TL smoothers did, in fact, help that I didn’t have to reduce the print speed. As much as I would have otherwise had to have done to achieve the same print quality. Any set of TL Smoothers should largely be fine, But if you want the exact set. I got, there’s a link to that down below number seven legs and bungee cords because I wanted to have both printers on a single Ikea table side by side. I needed to move the filament spools and control boxes out of the way a couple cheap bungee cords hold the spools, just fine, and some very quick printed legs raised at the cr10 enough to slide the control boxes underneath number six extruder and y motor heatsinks. This one doesn’t have that big of an impact on print quality, but because my extruder motor is held in place with PLA. I don’t want it getting the usual over 50 degrees Celsius that it does. The extruder motor has gone from seat belt in a Texas summer. Hot to just warm. The y motor went from touchably hot to barely warm number Five bigger nozzles. If you print out those legs with a 0.8 millimeter nozzle, it will be a perspective changing experience, seeing a six hour print. Take under an hour will leave you wondering how anyone can stand a 0.4 millimeter nozzle These days. I only leave one cr10 with the standard 0.4 millimeter size and a 0.6 millimeter nozzle is what I use on most of the other printers. I have two people that occasionally want D D Minis, But just about everything else is human scale mechanical stuff that doesn’t need sub one millimeter detail, number four noise dampening. I have never had a silent 3d printer, nor have I actively sought one out. I had a very small i3 style printer that was not loud because it was so small and lightweight, The CR-10 isn’t as bad as the Xyz Davinci pro after about 1500 print hours. But it is still loud enough that my wife complains about hearing the upstairs printers through two closed doors. If I drop the travel speed that helps with noise. But the last thing 3d printing needs is to be made slower. My first attempt at making the noise less abrasive was printing some tpu feet to decrease the amount of vibration Going into the hollow table. The complaints stopped as long as both sets of doors were closed. Though travel speeds on the y-axis were definitely still audible to complete the silencing of the cr-10. I picked up a set of rubberized motor mounts that prevent the stepper motors vibrating the whole printer frame. The silencing is extremely noticeable in person, not so much in the video. Here’s a comparison between one printer that has the silencing mounts on and one that doesn’t, uh, the printers used to be loud enough that I could make music with them, but those days are now over the exact pack I got was a set of four mounts, which I was able to split across two cr-10s just applying them to the X and Y-axes. The only sound you hear four feet away Is the extruder fan. These mounts are cheaper than an upgraded control board and far easier to install also helping with noise. My oldest cr-10 had a control box fan whose bearings were dying. See this video for an example of what that sounds like and rather than keep smacking the side of the control box. Every time I turned on the power, I gutted all three internal fans and downloaded this Thingverse file to swap in a pair of fans from a 10 3 pack. The silence of the control box is surprising. If you do open the control box to do that Mod, please for the love of all that is FDM printing. Unplug the power cable with the control box on so that you can drain as much power from the capacitors as possible, don’t die over six dollars worth of plastic fans, number three dual gear direct drive extruder. The reason I moved the extruder motor onto the X-axis was to help with printing flexible materials and also reduce the boogers. I get with pet g. This adapter from Thingverse works, but only if you’re using the stock filament driver, clamp and gear. If you upgrade to a metal extruder gear setup, it can sometimes still fit, But since I was going with a dual gear setup, I had to modify the Thingverse file, shifting the motor mount down a few millimeters because there was no way A one inch length of ptfe tubing was going to make this impossible bend. I also had to cut part of the left side down to prevent the mount from blocking the y-axi’s end stop. I do have slightly reduced Z-axi’s build volume, but not enough to actually limit what I print the other. More serious drawback is that with the X-axi’s mounted extruder, there’s now no room to put hats on my printer heads. This was almost a deal breaker, and I’m still not quite over it emotionally. Just yet. Number two battery backup. This 660 watt ups is capable of keeping a single printer alive for about an hour of printing PLA. It is barely enough to keep both printers running If you’re printing pet g or anytime. They both need to heat their beds. The mains power here is generally okay, but no one likes losing a 20 hour print when it’s just a minor power surge, most outages here only last a few seconds or a couple minutes and even when printing pad G. This battery is still big enough to keep the printers running without interruption. Lastly, the most impactful upgrade is octoprint. Both upstairs printers are connected to raspberry Pi 3s running octoprint It lets me avoid the slow menu navigation on the control box, and it allows me to feed commands directly to the printer. I keep a free hand-me-down laptop on the printer network right here so that I can pre-heat quickly for material changes level the print bed in half the time set up time lapse, check print progress, and, most importantly, I can edit the g-code changing things like fan speed or temperature, which is a welcome speed up If I’m printing a bunch of material samples, So I don’t have to re-slice and re-upload. If I just need to change the bed temperature, I made simple mounts and used a 3d printer pen to weld the raspberry Pis to the legs of the printers. All my printers also send me a notification to my phone when they finish and these two indoor printers use if this then that to trigger led status messages onto this raspberry pi in my office. What Mods do you have on your cr-10? Let me know in the comments. You can watch these videos in higher quality and a little bit earlier on Librarytv subscribe on Youtube. I’m 3dpc and Ill. See you in the next one, you.