I have now finally reached the point that I can leave the house when my printer is printing. I mastered bed adhesion and fixed all mechanical flaws.
All the problems I came across costed me alot of filament more than I would have liked. This could have been easily avoided by an updated manual and tutorial from k8200.eu
The k8200 is unfortunately not perfect it has it’s mechanical flaws. I made a small list of what velleman should really change or explain on the website’s tuturials/manuals
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The stepper drivers work without flaw at 0.55V, but the tutorial says to put them at 0.425V which is atleast not enough for the extruder motor. The manual should be updated to 0.55V
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What I would have really liked to know is that the perfect bed temperature which allow for absolute perfect flawless adhesion for PLA is 70C and not 50C as said in the tutorial. Knowing this can save one as well tonnes of filament and additonal needless adhesion aid products such as hairspray, stinky gluesticks or tape. It is that I happened to read this on the internet somewhere or I would still be printing at 60C as nobody on this forum could tell me this… I did ask. I purchased the appropiate glassplate because I had poor adhesion in the beginning. But if you print at 70C with the default printbed, you dont need anything extras for it.
-This brings me to the issue that the 12V supply is insufficiënt to heat the print bed. With a glassplate I could only reach ~65C which would drop drastically during printing, if one is to achief perfect bed adhesion, a 24V supply is needed.
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The Z-axis coupler is a faulty part, which can cause a lot of problems with the Z-axis drive. Velleman should either warn the user in the build manual about this, or provide a correct flexibile axis coupler.
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The black block of ABS on top of the extruder which guides the filament through the gear and the bearing should be replaced. This part is not attached, it sits loose over 2 bolts and it will come of. The result is that the filament wont be pulled into the extruder anymore and you’d be printing hot air instead, I had to develop and print a new block for it.
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If you have a 2kg roll of filament your extruder may lift itself on the filament, causing print-ruining-shifts in X and/or Y movement (try to figure out yourself what the problem possibly can be). In the get started tutorial you are told to print a cover for the PCB. That page should let you print 2 decent spool holders instead and tell you to buy 2 M6 bearings for it.
I thought that a good solution for velleman would be is to start selling a small update kit for new commers containing: 2x or 4x M6 bearings for spool-holders, a new block for filament receiver which cannot come loose, a 24V power supply + small PCB with relais or MOSFET and a flexible axis coupler for the Z-axis. And ofcourse update the manuals with atleast correct stepper voltage and bed temperatures.
EDIT:
- update kit should also contain trapezoïdal spindel. M8 nut will wear out