Thanks again to Private Internet Access for sponsoring the video! Check them out at www.privateinternetaccess.com/Toms3d What are the hacks that you found work for solving ringing on your prints?
Hey Thomas, Long time viewer, Love the way you deliver content, No drama, No pointless facts or effects, No Clickbaits, Your video guides showed me the way when I first got started with 3D Printing, thanks for that... I usually don't comment on youtube videos so if i'm here i may as well use this opportunity to thank you for al your hard work, If you plan to return to the topic in a future video, maybe you can try the following options: 1. build a small wooden sandbox and place the printer still bolted to the concrete paver 2. Place a piece of high-density foam under the printer still bolted to the concrete paver And thanks again for everything you do here.
hey, im in a project that takes plastic water bottles, and turns them into filament. Its called re-creator 3d and we have a discord as well. I'm reaching out in behalf of josh the owner to see if you want to work with us. We also plan on selling a kit down the line to help make it easy to recycle yourself. think you would be willing to reach out to set something up?
Awesome video. It would be cool to try repurposed turntable feet which are designed to do the same as the fast feet but are often well built and a bit more elegant.
Filling with sand and small lead shot could be interesting. Or putting heavy material into the external slots of the extrusion to give you more room to add mass.
How much ringing is caused by the print bed being mounted on springs? Also, many cheaper bed-slinging printers have the print bed mounted on a single narrow rail, which has a narrow footprint. These are things that I think about in regard to ringing.
That sort of thing has been tried a lot in the world of small mills and lathes. Doesn't make a detectable difference. 99% of all chatter and vibration originates between the the point where work is being done, and the nearest linear slide/way. If you're flexing the actual chassis of your machine, you're definitely well past the capability of your tool and work holding capability. Sand won't make that go away.
I'm so glad you differentiated by salmon skin and ringing. SO many times in the community people look at me like I'm crazy for suggesting that they are different things and shouldn't both just be called "ringing" for diagnostic purposes
The reddit community is full of novelty printers that badly want to be 3d printing guru's. The lack of knowledge before giving advice there is out of this world
Usually when I hear people using paver blocks they're also putting foam/padding under the paver block as well, probably to act like those dampener feet while the paver takes care of that Y resonance as you saw. Though I also don't think I've heard people bolting the printer down to the paver either. Maybe a part 2 where you do the sand/weight filling and paver + padding head to head?
I was just about to comment about the paver and squishy Item too. I forget where I watched it but the combination works really well from what I remember. Alas I do not remember what the squishy item was with the paver.
@@williamwinslow8807 I use a foam cushion pad that you would use in a old dining seat. CNC kitchen did a video a few years ago on using foam and concrete pavers.
Yep, I have a big heavy paver block with some large squishy foam pads under the 4 corners, with my CR-10 sitting directly on top of the paver. Works pretty well, though I don't know if it's better than just the 3D printed dampening feet.
Filling with sand reminds me of techniques for improving hi-fi systems. Filling with sand is used in speaker stands to add mass and dampen resonance. How about mounting the frame on speaker spikes as well? Worth looking at.
@@peter.s.3207 They are meant to isolate actually, they are meant to be used on a hard surface like concrete marble or glass. It's about reducing the surface area as much as possible.
It is all about the frequency you try to kill. The PLA feet might have had a close enough resonant frequency that the printer mass oscillated in the opposing way and started to cancel the ringing. A stiffer material might kill higher frequencies, while softer kill lower ones ? If you would measure the frequency and adjust the tension with a servo in synch, you would get most likely very good results. Similar like an input shaper paired with accelerometer does.
This is the first realistic comment I have seen. Any system has a set of resonant frequencies inherently, and when printing a specific model, specific frequencies are amplified and others are diminished. A different model will produce different results. Rigidity, counterbalances, damping all play a role, but all come with tradeoffs. Well said, @SarahKchannel
Might be enough to just have a small set of "tuned" wobbly feet that can be swapped out to cover different print speed bands for a given model of printer.
Interesting. I dismissed a lot of these feet in the past, I always thought rigidity was better, I think there is a place for rigidity. I think it depends on what sort of feedback loop the surface your printer is on creates. I'm still curious about whether or not stiffening every axis of the printer would improve the prints more than dampening the printer.
@@nophead Your comment reminds me that I have seen stepper dampeners, that always looked like something superfluous for FDM. It might be worth investigating but I think that's only for the perpendicular axis?
@@nophead If you take a stepper and put it on its back, shaft up and the axis that goes from the top of the shaft to the back, I'm trying to figure out if that's the axis that is dampened the most. I might have a bad understanding of the dampeners.
@@frankb5728 The shaft shouldn't move perpendicularly. It is pushed one way by a spring against a bearing and stays locked unless you have enough force to defeat the spring. The vibration you get is rotationally. The magnetic field pull increases as you displace the rotation from its resting point, so it acts like a spring. and will oscillate with the mass of the load when it steps. Rotational dampers dampen the rotational oscillations. They can be fluid filled or perhaps rubber mounts that allow the motor to rotate slightly in a damped way. That is what you are probably thinking of.
I actually just saw a guy in a voron group who used lead shot and epoxy in his frame. i believe he said it added a ton of weight and really stiffened up the frame a lot. I think it would be pretty cool to see some real testing done.
Using epoxy with the lead shot will increase the mass but not create damping the same as if they were loose. When they're loose there's more damping since there's room for them to move and disperse vibration. Like a deadblow hammer
Since the pink feet had significant impact on improvement, I would print out more ... maybe out of different materials, maybe wider/longer or thicker and experiment to see if there was any more improvement
I do love having my printer sitting on the pavers, but not mounted to them like you did. It took all of the noise that my printer was transferring into the table away and made it almost silent. So it is very useful for noise, even if it doesn’t help with ringing.
Same here. I also added a relatively dense foam slab under the paver. This way the printers vibrations are transfered into the foam, while the paver keeps it stable. Works really well
Most of the audible noise from printers with better stepper drivers comes from the cooling fans on my machines. Unfortunately there the weight of the machine and pavers don't help much to keep it silent...
My Sidewinder X1 sits on four squash balls (the most dampening ones from decathlon ). The improvements are astounding even after turning acceleration up to eleven. Keep up the great content!
I haven't tested this myself, but I've seen results from couple Finnish users that have done such mod for some printers and for some, it can indeed be really good dampener. Also what I've understood you can buy them with different elasticity which apparently makes them nice thing to fiddle around. I've been planning to do this myself.
Thanks! I need current help new to 3D printing just bought an Ender 3, and it's rough, upgraded the bed to the glass things got a little better, upgraded the hot end to the Swiss one, and yeah got a little better upgraded the filament feeder and still getting better. Is that why people buy the Ender 3 to upgrade it??
My solution, while not eliminating ringing, did reduce it a lot, and also killed almost all the noise of the printer - I put the printer on a thick plywood sheet, to keep the frame in shape, and placed a folded towel between the plywood and table. Noise almost gone, ringing greatly improved. That towel is just a great vibration damper.
I use input shaper to measure this somewhat more objectively in klipper. I did a fair amount of testing of a variety of foam, rubber, cork, and multimaterial antivibration dampening feet tiles and pads, as well as amplifier feet, svs subwoofer feet, compressor feet on the printer, and a variety of different durometer sorbothane antivibration pucks, and an 80 lb 24x24x2 paver. I tried multiple individual things and combinations, and ultimately landed with the paver on top of rubber+cork pads, with amp feet on the printer, with sorbothane 45 durometer pucks under them above the paver. I was able to get a clean single spike above 60 hz at around 10500 accel in 1e3 scale in both x and y axis on mzv, allowing me to basically print 300 mms/10k accel all the time with minimal smoothing and no ringing on a very large 350 voron 2.4. And this is on a 400 lb workbench that wobbles badly in y.
@@Tedlasman You still need the resonances clean and minimized physically to do 10k+ accel accurately. IS can get rid of the ringing, but you'll have rounded off corners instead if you go above the acceleration it recommends.
Trying this out with some more “designed” solutions would be interesting as well. Either something using a viscous oil, or a lattice/infill structure with soft TPU might give more of a targeted damping. If you wanted to go super fancy, you can even tap test to measure the frequency response, and tune the damping factor (by adjusting print parameters of the TPU) to your machine’s dynamics.
I have an even easier and cheaper solution. I cut some little rectangles of the packing foam that my Ender 3 shipped in and put them under the feet. It definitely reduces noise, and the foam has some slight give that should provide good dampening. It would be interesting to see a comparison of that vs the printed feet.
My solution is at the bed itself. The bed had an aluminum foil liner, foam liner, aluminum tape, spring loaded cams at the 4 post, screws run through a combination felt-silicone gasket with a plastic gasket up top of each screw. Not much vibration wise gets to the bed that isn't also present in the floor, desk, or even ground outside. However vibrations make it into the extruder and give their own set of resonance faults that on taller prints can be utilized for decal since they are incredibly predictable by time you get the bed dampened as good as you can. Also helps to soak all your bearings in a jar of oil every few months, helps clean them up and makes them last a lot longer. Speaking as a poor boy that loved rollerblading and had to keep a good set of pig bearings going for years on end jumping ramps, riding on rough concrete and sometimes dirt roads.
For my MK3S, the best feet i've ever used, and have for years now, are the ones with 2yellow dotted squash balls by far. Nothing compares to them in terms of print quality and sound dampening combined.
@@gavinsauer1608 There is one I found that looks pretty good, will print and try it out soon. Links on youtube comments are kinda finnicky, so go on printables and search for Yosuke (the person who designed them) or the exact title, "Squash ball feet for Prusa i3 mk3s".
@@gavinsauer1608 yeah what the other guy said. Most importantly make sure you get 2 yellow dot squash balls, they provide the best results. I tested other kinds of balls and these are amazing.
TH-cam recommended me this video, and it's an instant sub. Wished I found this years ago when discovered all of the stuff the hard way back in 2017 on my Anet A8. I already bought it heavily modified with a very sturdy plywood base, but it happened to have some ghosting. I thought a better base would be good, but I didn't wanted to remove the base, so I clamped to the table and still happening. Then I discovered that it was due to internal vibrations. You need to have your belts well tightened, have 0 play in any chassis bit, by 0, i mean 0, all screws well tightened up or it's a chance for ghosting to happening, every thousandth adds up, needless to say, to reinforce the chassis if you have a chance, also I swapped the linear bearings to bronze bushings, they were way cheaper, self lubed, and also better, because when the bearings start to wear, the small balls have a tiny flat spot and lead to tiny vibrations. Didn't tried the ceramic ones, but they are a good option. And finally I added some hot glue at the very top of the Z rod axis as it wobbled even with the modded piece. It secured the rod in place, and it act as a small damper. That are my 5 cents! Have a nice printing everybody!
the CNC kitchen style concrete slab + soft cell packing foam approach works great. And sand in the extrusions also does a really good job, a bunch of the speed printing freaks use it.
I actually have all my printers on a sheet of MDF ontop of a piece of EVA foam floormat tile. This includes my Ender 3s and Voxelab Aquilas which those 4 are bone stock. I never seem to have any ghosting/ringing and my desk vibrations are more or less non existent as they can't even be picked up by some of the precision instruments I have.
Turns out I accidently did the same thing with some thick upholstery foam on my Wanhao D3 V1 about 2 years ago... I did it to isolate the vibrations of my 4988 drivers from my apartment floor to be nice to my neighbors. But I also just don't see much ringing in my prints, as I don't print those kinds of prints, so never noticed the correlation.
What about putting the printer o a sand bed? Like filling a box with sand, puting some cloth over it to prevent sand getting to the printer and the printer on it to dampen the vibration?
Really interesting. And what a great space you have there. I’m quite jealous. For those of us using Input Shaper, it’s really easy use that as a crutch and forget about passive vibration reduction. It’d be interesting to test Input Shaper with and without feet. The issue is you can only generate the Input Shaper settings with a stationary printer, as there’s no fixed accelerometer to use as a reference. If you put the printer on feet, Input Shaper won’t be able to distinguish the overall solid-body printer motion, from the tool head to bed relative motion (which is the only motion we care about). But if you calibrate without the feet, and then mount on the feet, the reduction in the relative motion provided by the feet would lead to Input Shaper over-correcting. The only way around this I can see would be for Input Shaper to adopt a dual accelerometer configuration with one on the tool head, the other on the most rigid part of the printer.
You’ve actually just described an issue with input shaper that happens all of the time, not just with wobbly feet. The printer body always moves relative to its surroundings unless it’s bolted directly to a concrete floor and even then there’s still some flex in the printer. Using an accelerometer isn’t a perfect solution but it usually works pretty well because the resonances of the whole printer are often the same as those measured at the nozzle and bed. But there may be differences if you have very loose or flexible parts. What you really need is an accelerometer at the nozzle, on the bed and on the main body of the printer capturing acceleration in all dimensions, then cancelling out to show what the true nozzle to bed interaction is. In practice, you could run input shaper before or after installing the wobble feet and it would likely work just as well. There is no such thing as over-compensating. Input shaper will not over-correct and cause different ringing patterns, that’s just not how it works. It reduces the motion over a range of frequencies by a certain percentage. The wobbly feet did not get rid of the ringing, it damped it so it was less visible. The input shaper will reduce the initial impulse that caused the ringing. They should actually work well together.
Are there any versions using two (print head + frame) or the very overkill three (print head + frame + surface/tale) accelerometers to account for that error you mentioned?
A maybe funny thing I learned in my career as a R1D technician: One client of us once came up with a solution you might not expect directly. They were developing a acoustic sound recording rig for determining the natural frequency and damping effect of metallic materials in order to predict the mechanical properties of their pieces by acoustics. They used tennis balls for dampening. The table that sat on the tennisballs had quite some weight to it. The bottom surface had the same spherical recesses as the balls. It did the trick perfectly. You basically want the same effect as for an ideal car wheel suspension: a spring for absorbing the first bump and a damper for absorbing the "echo". Imho, a 3D printer is a trade off between rigidity and speed. More rigid constructions will weigh more, thus slowing the process down or adding effects because of inertia of that weight. In CNC machines, lamellar cast iron beds are used for absorbing these kinds of effects as it has a high dampening effet by nature. basically everything that sounds dull when you hit it (no "tinggggg" but "df" when you hit it) should be contributing to avoiding these effects.
I would love to see your take on implementation of sand filled frames, or a printer housed inside an elastic bound tesseract frame. I had tried the stone platform on thick foam a while back, like CNC kitchen displayed one time, but I could find the proper thickness of foam, so the printer ended up tilting to one side as a default position.
I work as industrial maintenance guy from the past decade. We do what is called the geometry of machinery in my mother language, not sure how they call it in English. A thing I didn't learned from the school and experience was my way to get it right: vibration, alignment and other factors that can mess a machine must not be fight, but changed to the most ideal range. There is always a working scheme that will make mechanisms resonate, so you calculate it in a way that the resonation don't mess the product. Specially about vibration, the way to go isn't always making everything sturdier, but appropriately directing all the vibration to the machine's base (ideally by moving the center of mass down in the machine is a great feat).
When woodworking, using a scroll-saw, there was an idea of building a 2” high box base with 4 dividers on the x and y. The dividers had 1/2”holes drilled half way up between junctions of dividers. This was then filled to the top of the holes withs sand. Then a top secured to this structure. The scroll-saw once secured to the top of this box, the vibration was reduced a lot. May be worth trying out. Regards.
I would of liked to see these vibrations tests on printers that don't have a moving Y-Bed, also I'm surprised you didn't go into the topic of input shaping and comparing that as well.
I might try; Oversize extrusions Filling the unused slots in the existing extrusions with resin Oversize drive belts Higher quality belts Diagonal bracing Rubber dampers at structural joints
Interesting results, especially since I've had the exact opposite observations: Flexible feet made ringing worse, and while the paver didn't remove it completely, the resonant frequency and amount of banding changed dramatically (I use klipper on a heavily modded E3, and used an ADXL345 to measure resonances in a bunch of different configurations; as of right now, a paver, a layer of cork, and a rock solid cabinet is the best combination I've found for my setup, and the MZV input shaper seems to prefer working with the high frequencies that results in) Guess the best part is that it costs next to nothing to print a set of those feet and just try it out, so even if the results vary there's nothing stopping people from checking for themselves
thats because a stiffer frame leads to a higher reasonating frequency (or just removing one of the frequencies). But without input shaper its the opposite. The wobbly printer makes the amount of mass needed to push against less when it comes to the hotend, so it doesn't have to vibrate as much.
Maybe attaching similar mass as the print head on the other half of the belt but moving opposite side would help balancing it out? Definitely worth trying.
I work in a machine shop, we use some pretty precise measuring equipment that can be affected by the vibrations of machinery. To lessen this we have granite blocks on the work benches with really squishy rubber pads on top, between the granite and the measuring equipment. Of course, this setup is for eliminating outside influences on the measurements, but I wonder if it would work for 3d printers
I suggest you try a test with a 3d printer on one of those concrete blocks, with a layer of soft foam underneath it. The foam allows for movement, while the concrete neutralizes some sound and lesser vibrations. Possibly the best of both worlds, imo...
I put foam pads under my Prusa which is then sat on a concrete paving slab years ago, done mainly to reduce vibration noise transferring to the surface it's sat on and works well, now I hear it helps with reducing ghosting, what a nice bonus :)
I agree. I use rolled up pads of shower foam mat. Decouple the table the printer is on from being a sounding board and the fine aircells and thickness of the pads quench the vibrations in the frame really well. In the couple of printers I've heavily modified, I changed all the steppers from 1.8 degree type to 0.9 degree type. Makes a big difference with the poorer quality stepper motor drivers. you can also experiment with wrapping the centre of support struts with something heavy like coils of solder, over a wrap of foam shower mat. Everything that makes a noise that you have the freedom to do this to. Cork gaskets from frame to stepper motors is another option.
I have a 3D printer with a steel frame and some substantial ringing with the default setting. But when I reduced the acceleration from 3000 or 5000 to 500, I had no ringing at all, but the print was noticeably slower, because of course it took some time to pick up speed after it stopped or after one axis needed to start from zero at an edge of an object. So I use an acceleration of 1000 as a compromise with very little ringing and only a bit reduced overall printing speed.
Some time ago I did some research on the relation between print time and acceleration. The effect is surprisingly small. Print speeds are so slow that acceleration doesn't have to be set very high. The printer reaches its print max speed really quickly already. I am a printing quality freak and even reduced the acceleration to 150mm/s2. Perimeters are at 20mm/s and infill 60mm/s. I admit, my printer is slow nowadays because I went crazy with the settings. But quality wise, this thing works like a charm.
This is a great video. I think you should continue with your dampening project. I work with CNC machining centers and I was thinking adding mass would have a more noticeable impact. But adding dampening to the printer is an experiment worth doing. I also would be interested in what adding both mass and dampening would do. But there is a point of diminishing returns where considerable expense will be added to cost of the printer. I have personally used hard rubber aircraft engine mounts to reduce noise and vibration of a machine. They do not deform with heat.
The belts seems to be the main issue.. I have seen some new types of belt used in some new 3D printers and am curious if a different drive material would result in less ringing.
@@chrismorrison9140 You sure about this? I think the belt being too loose or too tightness would affect how much the X or Y would resonate when moving. Belts transfer the stepper motors rotation into movement for the X and Y.. So it would ringing would be affected by how tight or loose the belt is. Would have been good if the video did some ringing test based on belt tightness level.
@@chrismorrison9140 I’ve seen a significant difference at certain speeds and tension, especially over time as they wear. Keeping them properly tensioned makes a huge difference with ringing (on certain machines).
Great video Thomas! Great to see some myths busted in an easily digestible format. I would love to see more videos going into depth on topics of what actually matters when it comes to expensive parts vs cheap parts and how some solutions might be very good from a theoretical standpoint, but infeasible from a marketing standpoint such as "sand in the printer frame" that you mention. Keep up the good work :)
If you really fill it up with sand you could also test the squash ball feet because they are often recommended for dampening and I heard of them since I got my first printer years ago but I've never tried them. Great video btw!
I'd love to see the sand filled frame. I thought 'more ridgid, more weight' would be better - not sure if it really would, but if that's the case - Lead filled extrusions would be worth a try too. (just put endcaps of other material to stay lead-free contact, etc)
My thing that many in the Anet group have tried with success...Is to mount the machine hard to a plate of MDF/chip board like countertops are made from. Ideally a counter top cutoff that can be cut and glued back to back leaving the laminate surface on both sides. This is 1.5 to 2" thick and leaves 6-8" beyond the printer base. You can put feet on the bottom of this plinth, I used wine corks to make 3 feet. The resulting base is HEAVY and dense, but does not ring like concrete. Quiets it way down.
I've always gone for the concrete paver on a wobbly/cushioned/springy support - originally, I did this purely to keep non-trinamic printers from resonating through benchtops and amplifying the sound, but between using that base and turning down speeds, I've seen ringing practically disappear. Still very much looking forward to getting my hands on a Klipper printer someday and setting up true resonance damping with an accelerometer, but for now, this is working reliably enough :)
tennisball sized bags filled with sand, put under the rubberfeet would be interesting to test. quick and easy solution for everyone. had the first print these days where ringing was a problem, so perfect timing.
Perhaps the trick to the effectiveness of the CNC Kitchen-style paver/foam block combo is due to the paver spreading/evening out vibrations, while the foam allows them to pass through to some extent? With just the paver, you're adding rigidity but not really doing anything to dampen vibrations.
Firstly put it on floor instead of table. It really helps to dampening the vibrations. Ender 3 pro is tower-like printer, printer will vibrate more Y direction than X direction in same speeds because of mass of the bed. Optionally connect to the wall along Y direction (if you can) I know you hate the community of klipper but put aside of your bias and install it for INPUT SHAPING. Don't forget the accelerometer. (If it is hard to install klipper just install fluidd or mainsail). When it sits on the floor and calibrate input shaping then print it. When you want to move your printer another location calibrate because natural frequency changes. As a mechanical engineer I could say: if you want to change natural frequencies range of your system you have 2 options. 1. Add more mass (direct connection to floor includes this) 2. Spring and dampening elements which both makes your system's natural frequency jump to another range. 3D printers are not working with constant vibrations. Different accelerations comes with different vibrations. Because of that you have to calculate or simulate with every move of your printer. Input shaping nearly does this. According the calculated natural frequency values it cancels the vibrations with specified method of your choice (or automaticly chooses for you if you prefer that way)
I don't think there is enough empty space in those small aluminium extrusions to make a significant difference. But putting the entire printer in a bed of sand might help. But it would also cause issues as soon as the sand gets where it's not supposed to :D
You're right. Volume inside aluminium extrusions is ridiculously low. I suppose it _might_ have some effect to pour something like lead inside them and even then weight increase would be marginal. Sand though? Most definitely not going to be visible. If someone wants weight in profiles, I'd much rather just make brackets and slap some profile or heck even add another extrusion and fix them together.
I wouldn't mind seeing you try sand-fill, just because we often hear people muse about it and otherwise claim armchair expertise without testing it, but we never see any empirical demonstrations on TH-cam (that I've found). Also, I would recommend a few other tests: - Try the paver again, without anchoring the machine to it as a single body with fasteners - Try longer versions of the damper feet, to cover more or all of the length of the base extrusion - Try placing the damper feet at different rotations in regard to the orientation of the base, with both a single set and multiple sets - Try alternate shapes for the damper feet. The current one damps the x OR y axis, but not both and not any tangents. One that can shift on two (cross) or three (triangle/hex) horizontal-plane axes or even in a round fashion (circle/bulb) might produce even better results. - And someone else below suggested testing the damping feet at different locations along the base extrusion
For damping it might be worth trying magnetic damping. If you had a large price of copper and some strong magnets held in close proximity the magnets movement induces eddie currents in the copper block absorbing a lot of energy. Could put the printer on springs and have strong magnets on each corner above some copper blocks. Not sure if it would work but I think it would be cool to try.
One of the best things i've found is marble and foam. I've got my printer on a heavy marble cutting board type thing with a chunk of 2" thick foam under it. The foam is the black stuff found in camera cases and pelican type boxes and such. I also use foam between the marble and printer. So the setup is printer with small foam pads for feet on top of the marble, with a block of foam under the marble, basically the same size as the marble, and that all sits on a sheet of 3/4" plywood. Between all that it dampens and isolates so much that it's completely silent as far as resonance sounds and vibrations go, all i can hear is the motors and fans humming along smoothly, huge difference from having it bolted down solid to the plywood. Some things i think would be interesting to try would be to float it on water, on air (like on an air hockey table, and on something like an air mattress) or on damping feet consisting of two unconnected flat faces separated by a layer of grease so it 'floats' on the grease film. This type of plate damping is used in lots of applications, like doing vehicle alignments and i suspect that finding the right viscosity grease would do wonders for x/y damping without affecting the Z axis. When i got my printer the stock frame was a wobbly flexing mess, but it still printed well enough to print out a bunch of stiffening braces and replacements for the acrylic parts. As i stiffened it up all the problems started appearing like collisions, z banding and such, so i then had to stiffen up the carriages and do an oldham bearing on the z. When the frame was flexy, it covered up a lot of the problems with the flexy carriages, and once i got the everything rock solid and the Z floating free on bearings with the foam/marble/foam base everything just came together.
I'd love to see whether allowing the printer to roll along marbles would help. This would allow for small movements parallel to the table surface, with very little resistance - to stop the printer from wandering, a set of feet could be made with very slight concave indents to enable motion, but keep the printer on top of the marbles. To provide even better damping, a layer of foam could be used to interface each concave foot with the printer. Just a thought, and probably too much effort to put in when other very effective damping feet already exist haha
I have a cube-style printer and am pretty sure my open square bays are oscillating. Something as simple as tensioned cables could likely fix ringing issues with little cost and weight. Since you don't mind modifying this printer, try adding "guy wires" to the frame front to back on both ends. Also, regarding the ringing you see, is it happening in just one axis, or both? That's a strong tipoff on which axis needs stiffening.
When i was studying physics we had some delicate and very vibration sensitive equipment. We used to use concrete suspended from bungee cord...seemed to work pretty well combining two things you suggested.
ive had fantastic luck with squash balls as the feet of my printer! They work extremely well and do the same thing the PLA feet do, plus they last much longer!
Try magnetic levitation like you would for a laser table essentially you have a table for printer here and a post with two powerful ring neodymium magnets with the same pole facing each other it should make a extremely good vibration dampener for this task as well as one that will last a very very long time as there's not really any component where their
I don't see anywhere you said exactly what accelerations you used, but at the ones I saw the printer moving at, ringing is a *completely* solved problem with input shaper.
Instead of concrete or sand, how about cast iron? That's routinely used as the body of machines because of its excellent vibration dampening properties.
Awesome video. I would love to see a follow up on what feet would have the best result. I'm currently using a different type of feet and they don't really bounce a lot, so I'm wondering if they're not too stiff. When reasoning about why it works; it's actually no surprise that the feet work best, as you explained very thoroughly. With cars you have a thing called unsprung weight, that's everything that's not cushioned by suspension (which is basically all the tyres and brakes). You need a good spring/damper combination, to dampen all both the vibrations of the chassis and of the wheels, as it's impossible to prevent undulations due to road imperfections. That matches the function of the vibration feet. Also, you want to keep that unsprung weight as low as possible, especially in relation to the chassis weight. That translates to adding sand to the frame for printing.
This might be a dumb question, but... Could you use acoustic pucks as the feet? I use them for my stereo speakers on stands. I also fill my stands with sand, but for this conversation, let's just stick to how well the IsoAcoustic pucks reduce frequency spikes when room testing. They are a game changer when it comes to sound quality. I would love to see if this helps (I don't own a 3D printer, just interested in them). Also, products like dynamat can be peeled and applied to surfaces strategically to reduce high frequency vibration, which seems to be the culprit in lower quality printing. Hope this thought is helpful to someone.
Here’s a thought (apologies if already mentioned below, tl;dr) -> How about magnetic damping? Put strong rare-earth magnets next to thick-ish conductive sheets (~1mm copper? ~3mm aluminum? - just wild guesses). Eddy currents create fields opposing the motion of the magnets, and the energy is dissipated in the conductor. X/Y seems to be where the problem is, so you could support the printer on ball casters above an aluminum plate, and suspend the magnets beneath it, very close to the plates. As a bonus, you can easily adjust the amount of dampening by moving the magnets closer to or further away from the plate. (Relatively weak metal coil-springs could maintain the printer’s nominal position.)
I wonder if it would help if you braced the frame with diagonal rods that have compliant bushes in them to absorb the vibrations, rather than the rigid rods that you see on some printers. Obviously making the frame of the printer out of heavier materials like steel is going to help, just by adding mass, but perhaps some rubber bushes here and there might help with the ringing. This of course would be a from-scratch build, but people are doing that anyway. I think I may have seen a few 3D printers made from steel, but I can't recall where.
I think CNC kitchen used one of those concrete squares but put some foam under that, to supress the vibrations. I am using a similar setup and it works well, it is a lot less noisier and i saw some improvement in quality
I use washing machine dampeners. They can be bought in hardware stores and you are supposed to cut them to size and put under washingmachines. They are made of cut up rubber and I think they work really nicely. It reduces noise by a lot, and it helps with ringing too.
When using feet or paving stones on the printer frame you're relying on the print head's harmonic oscillations to resonate with frame and the dampening is applied to the frame. It may be better to have dampening forces applied to the print head carriage directly (and separately for the print bed) with a secondary belt that's just a tensioned elastic cord parallel to the drive belt/ direction of movement. This would apply retarding forces only when the print head "slips" past its expected location due to the resonance at a fast enough speed that the elastic can slacken on one side only ie. slipping on the rollers. Sand filled beams work because the sand has little enough inertia to easily transfer the kinetic energy of the oscillating frames through their own resonance which is then lost through inelastic or stochastically elastic collisions with other sand grains but again requires the frame to quickly achieve resonance with the print head and bed. This is still alot better than nothing. I think it would be nifty to go the other way and see how prints fair while the whole thing is on a vibration table. In theory the vibrations would be random enough to prevent any specific resonance frequencies from being met but that depends on how well built the machine and the vibration table are.
In astronomy, we use soborthane pads under the tripod legs to dampen vibrations in the telescope mount as the telescope is moved. It seemed "obvious" therefore that you'd need to find the right resonant frequency of the 3d printer. Perhaps try different feet (by design or material) that has different damping characteristics and see which works best? I suspect the pink feet you used are too inconsistent, so could try different foam/rubber/etc pads or even soborthane and see how those work?
I wonder how well a counterweight system would work on a printer IF it was designed in from the get go, it'd be harder to implement on a Ultimaker style system or V-Wheel system (unless you can find the space for an additional carriage on each axis) but for most of the others it would just take an additional rail and mass and attaching it in opposition to the part that's moving
The bungee design was used by early afm (atomic force microscopy) users to decouple the building vibrations from the instrument. There is a tutorial online for a home diy version. Concrete slabs also ring. You need a honeycomb platform such as used in optical tables or a terrazzo plate with dampening feet. The terrazzo plate is sold to reduce vibrations when weighing on a high precision balance.
Perhaps try damping on the axis itself. I have 2 different ideas: 1) Linear damper. Essentially a very light duty version of the shock absorbers on a car. Not sure you'd find anything ready made to fit the application, and tuning it right to allow the regular axis movement while damping oscillations may be hard. 2) Add a weight (approximately) equal to the weight of the mass being moved on the axis on the "return" side of the belt, so it would move in the opposite direction. Probably easiest to test this with the extruder head, you would need something equal in weight to the extruder head that would run on the back side of the same extrusion as the extruder head. The opposite motions should (somewhat) cancel out. The downside is the stepper now has to move twice as much mass and so may not be able to hit the same acceleration rates.
What about placing the printer on a thick piece of dense sound dampening foam? The stuff the looks similar to carpet padding. I'd love to see that suspended cube setup in action
In terms of noise reduction there are several routes. One is isolation (like suspended mode), another is changing frequency (in general fundamental frequency (Hz) = sqrt (k/m) whre k is the rigidity and m is the inertional mass) up (by lowering mass and increase stiffness) or down (by increasing mass and lowering the stiffness). Now for a CNC or a printer you need certain stiffness for sharp turns.. so increasing stiffness is generally a good idea (more stiff belts, more stiff axis with heavy duty linear bearings) all while keeping a lightweight approach (so you want to increase the stiffnes by a lot more than what weight you added), and this will get a very high frequency of resonance on the axis. Then the frame will need to absorb those vibrations.. so here a lower frequency is desired but not by making it flimsy (you need as much stiffness as in the gantry) but adding a lot of mass to it. High frequencys from the gantry are killed by a huge inertional mass that can't resonate as fast (the frame and mount on the floor). So this is the CNC route - > as stiff as posible with cast iron frame with concrete poured feet in the factory floor. (or even better are pillars dug deep in the earth rather than the factory floor to keep the noise down as the huge building might be too flimsy and its walls act like speakers if the CNC shakes the floor.. isolating the builing from the CNC with it's own sepparate foundation is a great way to quiet it down). Solly to avoid ringing, a low enough stiffnes might avoid ringing by losing the edge of the corner.. making a not as sharp turn and experiencing less acceleration, but that is cheating and making subpar parts. Of course there are plenty of other tricks like having active dampeners to absorb any resonance wherever is needed.. so a printer can have active resonance dampeners on the belts, on the axis rods, on the frame if it's less rigid and vibrates, etc.
First off I am a novice when we are talking 3D printers That being said I own 2 and although I'm still learning have managed to dial them both in fairly well For a living I am a commercial transport refrigeration mechanic, I'm not as young as most of you so when it comes to my various trades and certificates I've been around the block a bit One of the things in all my trades I've done that remains true to this day is the most simple issues are often made complicated Regarding my printers (every machine is different in some small way even identical ones) they are both mechanically sound and my Firmware settings work well for them To reduce and almost eliminate ringing and ghosting I simply turned my jerk settings in the slicer programs down very low (8mms in Cura for example) Such a simple solution to what is actually a simple issue Nothing is perfect, even my cheap 3D touch sensor buzzes with my settings too high. But that should not ever stop us from trying to improve on current technologies be it mechanical or computing using HMI's If you really want to reduce friction harmonic vibrations you could always use iridium magnets and electricity and instead of using DC voltage to drive stepper motors use that same Gcode to power up or down the coils using AC voltage Much like one of those trains that glides over the tracks rather than on them Maybe Elon Musk will design a printer that costs 100k but prints absolutely perfectly lol
This is the kind of video we need more of. Absolutely would love to see the difference between a frame filled with sand or not; but I suspect you'd need quite a chonky frame (4040) to see much difference - you need to fit a lot of sand in there. Damp sand would probably also be better. Also, damping is not the same as dampening, people, but dampened sand may help damp your printer...but may also dampen it to much. Damn(p).
I wonder if the damping method they use to earthquake proof high-rise buildings could be somehow adapted. Basically they have a massive weight at the top of the building that's free to move. It counteracts the movement of the ground and keeps the building from resonating itself to pieces.
Your Benchy has a deformation at just a few mm off the base. I had this and, while it may not be your problem, I did look at my slicer output. The particular STL I got from thingiverse (there are several benchy), was slightly corrupted. Each of the starter layers was repeated. If you scrolled through the head movement in CURA, about 1/2 way through layer 1, it did layer 1 again. This was repeated for 2, 3, 4 for several mm. Pulling the stl into my cad program it warned me the stl had problems. So, I got a more 'official' benchy from another source and it was not bad like the first. And, now I don't have those flaws a few layers up.
I think you can get different results using damping feet with different spring stiffness. I'm thinking The reason why the suspended setup doesn't work is because the frequency that the bungee cord allows is way too small to counteract the higher frequencies of the printer frame. I think you need a tighter spring or firmer damping feet that can better match the frames higher frequency resonances. Just an idea.
Very interesting video. Thank you. Instead of filling the frame with sand what about placing the printer on a bed of sand, a bed of sand that has a very flexible cover such as rubber in order to reduce the mess, or have the printers legs rest on balls of sand (similar to the balls that people massage to supposedly reduce stress)? It would be interesting to see what impact they have on prints. Thanks again for all of your work.
I've got my Ender 3 on handballs, which are rubber but under-inflated. They seem to dampen everything exceptionally well - I never see ringing, despite adding a layer of glass to the bed and moving the extruder motor to the print head with a cheap direct drive conversion kit. That said, actually measuring the resonant frequencies and having the firmware adjust acceleration on the fly to cancel out ringing is the most effective approach.
Would be interesting to see what happens with if you put some linear sliders below the printer so that it can move on y and x. Then putting the dampening force on the height of the moving mass (of either axis) should help a lot of keeping stress off the frame. I am assuming that's the oscillation of the frame is around the forces trying to turn it into a parellelogram instead of a rectangle.
Interesting test. Did you see any difference in performance if you printed in a different direction? Normally adding mass to the part you want to stop movement on and adding a dampening material in between is the way to go and is commonly used for sensitive instruments . It might be easier to test on a Ender 5 - add mass to the z axis and some rubber mounts. This might tell us what part of the frame is resonating.
Hi Thomas, maybe "Alu-Butyl" or someting similar (Car-Hifi) could also help. Small parts could maybe be put on the moving parts to kill some resonances. I would be very interesting if you would try that out. Alu-Butyl is something many of your viewers could also try at home with their stock printers as it is fairly easy to apply, not too expensive and could be revoved with the right solvents. Best regards from Mannheim, Johannes
One of the DIY markets in Germany is selling or used to sell cardboard filled with sand that you can put behind drywall or under your favorite kind of flowing to dampen noise. So using sand is definitely beneficial.
Thanks again to Private Internet Access for sponsoring the video! Check them out at www.privateinternetaccess.com/Toms3d
What are the hacks that you found work for solving ringing on your prints?
input shaper
Hey Thomas,
Long time viewer,
Love the way you deliver content,
No drama, No pointless facts or effects, No Clickbaits,
Your video guides showed me the way when I first got started with 3D Printing, thanks for that...
I usually don't comment on youtube videos so if i'm here i may as well use this opportunity to thank you for al your hard work,
If you plan to return to the topic in a future video, maybe you can try the following options:
1. build a small wooden sandbox and place the printer still bolted to the concrete paver
2. Place a piece of high-density foam under the printer still bolted to the concrete paver
And thanks again for everything you do here.
I use 10mm belt x2 + 2 60mm stepper motor to solve the problem on this video.
hey, im in a project that takes plastic water bottles, and turns them into filament. Its called re-creator 3d and we have a discord as well. I'm reaching out in behalf of josh the owner to see if you want to work with us. We also plan on selling a kit down the line to help make it easy to recycle yourself. think you would be willing to reach out to set something up?
Awesome video. It would be cool to try repurposed turntable feet which are designed to do the same as the fast feet but are often well built and a bit more elegant.
Filling with sand and small lead shot could be interesting. Or putting heavy material into the external slots of the extrusion to give you more room to add mass.
Until the sand leaks... been there, done that
How much ringing is caused by the print bed being mounted on springs? Also, many cheaper bed-slinging printers have the print bed mounted on a single narrow rail, which has a narrow footprint. These are things that I think about in regard to ringing.
That sort of thing has been tried a lot in the world of small mills and lathes. Doesn't make a detectable difference. 99% of all chatter and vibration originates between the the point where work is being done, and the nearest linear slide/way. If you're flexing the actual chassis of your machine, you're definitely well past the capability of your tool and work holding capability. Sand won't make that go away.
maybe also just setting the entire printer on a bed of sand, would love to see that too
@@DerrangedGadgeteer exactly correct, physical laws makes you response correct also.
I'm so glad you differentiated by salmon skin and ringing. SO many times in the community people look at me like I'm crazy for suggesting that they are different things and shouldn't both just be called "ringing" for diagnostic purposes
So how do you fix the salmon skin ?
The reddit community is full of novelty printers that badly want to be 3d printing guru's. The lack of knowledge before giving advice there is out of this world
Would like to confirm, I was guilty of this now on a post in /r/prusa yesterday. Wish I'd remembered this video!
@@DevildudeEMZ.9 degree stepper motors or motors with a les aggressive snap on the steps
Usually when I hear people using paver blocks they're also putting foam/padding under the paver block as well, probably to act like those dampener feet while the paver takes care of that Y resonance as you saw. Though I also don't think I've heard people bolting the printer down to the paver either. Maybe a part 2 where you do the sand/weight filling and paver + padding head to head?
I was just about to comment about the paver and squishy Item too. I forget where I watched it but the combination works really well from what I remember. Alas I do not remember what the squishy item was with the paver.
yes this
@@williamwinslow8807 I use a foam cushion pad that you would use in a old dining seat. CNC kitchen did a video a few years ago on using foam and concrete pavers.
@@spartanash1 but it was mostly focused on noise, not artefacts, wasn't it?
Yep, I have a big heavy paver block with some large squishy foam pads under the 4 corners, with my CR-10 sitting directly on top of the paver. Works pretty well, though I don't know if it's better than just the 3D printed dampening feet.
Filling with sand reminds me of techniques for improving hi-fi systems. Filling with sand is used in speaker stands to add mass and dampen resonance. How about mounting the frame on speaker spikes as well? Worth looking at.
Speakers spikes are meant for carpet (pierce the wobbly carpet to better mount to the floor below). They won't do anything notable on hard surfaces
@@peter.s.3207 They are meant to isolate actually, they are meant to be used on a hard surface like concrete marble or glass. It's about reducing the surface area as much as possible.
@@peter.s.3207 They do something o hard surfaces - make your speakers unstable and scratch the floor!
Testing "audiophile" equipment addons on 3D a printer does sound kinda fun, not gunna lie
Whole different issue, does not apply. Lime machining using yo small machine or tooling chatter happens, adding san, springs mass does nothing.
It is all about the frequency you try to kill. The PLA feet might have had a close enough resonant frequency that the printer mass oscillated in the opposing way and started to cancel the ringing. A stiffer material might kill higher frequencies, while softer kill lower ones ?
If you would measure the frequency and adjust the tension with a servo in synch, you would get most likely very good results. Similar like an input shaper paired with accelerometer does.
This is the first realistic comment I have seen. Any system has a set of resonant frequencies inherently, and when printing a specific model, specific frequencies are amplified and others are diminished. A different model will produce different results. Rigidity, counterbalances, damping all play a role, but all come with tradeoffs. Well said, @SarahKchannel
Might be enough to just have a small set of "tuned" wobbly feet that can be swapped out to cover different print speed bands for a given model of printer.
Chris Riley did some tests a couple of weeks ago that are worth watching, including a variety of wobbly bases.
I was thinking the same thing. Chris got some impressive results with the setup I wouldn’t have expected to work as well.
Interesting. I dismissed a lot of these feet in the past, I always thought rigidity was better, I think there is a place for rigidity. I think it depends on what sort of feedback loop the surface your printer is on creates. I'm still curious about whether or not stiffening every axis of the printer would improve the prints more than dampening the printer.
Belts and stepper motors are springy, so with a stiff frame you will still get ringing in the print. Dampeners on the axes might be the way to go.
@@nophead Your comment reminds me that I have seen stepper dampeners, that always looked like something superfluous for FDM. It might be worth investigating but I think that's only for the perpendicular axis?
@@frankb5728 By "perpendicular axis" do you mean Z? I don't think ringing is an issue as it only moves once each layer.
@@nophead If you take a stepper and put it on its back, shaft up and the axis that goes from the top of the shaft to the back, I'm trying to figure out if that's the axis that is dampened the most. I might have a bad understanding of the dampeners.
@@frankb5728 The shaft shouldn't move perpendicularly. It is pushed one way by a spring against a bearing and stays locked unless you have enough force to defeat the spring. The vibration you get is rotationally. The magnetic field pull increases as you displace the rotation from its resting point, so it acts like a spring. and will oscillate with the mass of the load when it steps. Rotational dampers dampen the rotational oscillations. They can be fluid filled or perhaps rubber mounts that allow the motor to rotate slightly in a damped way. That is what you are probably thinking of.
I actually just saw a guy in a voron group who used lead shot and epoxy in his frame. i believe he said it added a ton of weight and really stiffened up the frame a lot. I think it would be pretty cool to see some real testing done.
Using epoxy with the lead shot will increase the mass but not create damping the same as if they were loose. When they're loose there's more damping since there's room for them to move and disperse vibration. Like a deadblow hammer
You can try using silicone with lead shot, the more rubbery the better.
lead powder would be best. think deadblow hammer
Since the pink feet had significant impact on improvement, I would print out more ... maybe out of different materials, maybe wider/longer or thicker and experiment to see if there was any more improvement
I do love having my printer sitting on the pavers, but not mounted to them like you did. It took all of the noise that my printer was transferring into the table away and made it almost silent. So it is very useful for noise, even if it doesn’t help with ringing.
Same here. I also added a relatively dense foam slab under the paver. This way the printers vibrations are transfered into the foam, while the paver keeps it stable.
Works really well
@@Daepilin I have my paver on a chopped up yoga mat... Maybe I should try putting the printer on the mat rather than the paver :/ or both.
Most of the audible noise from printers with better stepper drivers comes from the cooling fans on my machines. Unfortunately there the weight of the machine and pavers don't help much to keep it silent...
@@jradplowman actually I did that, I have my printer sitting on a foam floor mat on top of the pavers.
My Sidewinder X1 sits on four squash balls (the most dampening ones from decathlon ). The improvements are astounding even after turning acceleration up to eleven.
Keep up the great content!
I haven't tested this myself, but I've seen results from couple Finnish users that have done such mod for some printers and for some, it can indeed be really good dampener. Also what I've understood you can buy them with different elasticity which apparently makes them nice thing to fiddle around. I've been planning to do this myself.
Can you confirm if the balls you have are the ones with the 2 yellow dots called perfly SB 990 currently 2.15€ here?
@@almaefogo i'd like to know this too - which ones did you find give bestt results?
@@gedr7664 no idea I remember seeing a video on TH-cam about this squash balls from CNC kitchen iirc.
Need to search a bit more later.
@@almaefogo yes I can confirm these were the ones I chose.
Thanks! I need current help new to 3D printing just bought an Ender 3, and it's rough, upgraded the bed to the glass things got a little better, upgraded the hot end to the Swiss one, and yeah got a little better upgraded the filament feeder and still getting better. Is that why people buy the Ender 3 to upgrade it??
Thanks for the $5.00!
My solution, while not eliminating ringing, did reduce it a lot, and also killed almost all the noise of the printer - I put the printer on a thick plywood sheet, to keep the frame in shape, and placed a folded towel between the plywood and table. Noise almost gone, ringing greatly improved. That towel is just a great vibration damper.
I use input shaper to measure this somewhat more objectively in klipper. I did a fair amount of testing of a variety of foam, rubber, cork, and multimaterial antivibration dampening feet tiles and pads, as well as amplifier feet, svs subwoofer feet, compressor feet on the printer, and a variety of different durometer sorbothane antivibration pucks, and an 80 lb 24x24x2 paver. I tried multiple individual things and combinations, and ultimately landed with the paver on top of rubber+cork pads, with amp feet on the printer, with sorbothane 45 durometer pucks under them above the paver. I was able to get a clean single spike above 60 hz at around 10500 accel in 1e3 scale in both x and y axis on mzv, allowing me to basically print 300 mms/10k accel all the time with minimal smoothing and no ringing on a very large 350 voron 2.4. And this is on a 400 lb workbench that wobbles badly in y.
Justin, have you considered writing up your process? That would be a cool how-to.
@@gibsonblogger might do. I'm building a new printer in 48v will think about it when I'm done.
I just use input shaper to solve this :)
@@Tedlasman You still need the resonances clean and minimized physically to do 10k+ accel accurately. IS can get rid of the ringing, but you'll have rounded off corners instead if you go above the acceleration it recommends.
@@daliasprints9798 100%
Trying this out with some more “designed” solutions would be interesting as well. Either something using a viscous oil, or a lattice/infill structure with soft TPU might give more of a targeted damping. If you wanted to go super fancy, you can even tap test to measure the frequency response, and tune the damping factor (by adjusting print parameters of the TPU) to your machine’s dynamics.
I think tuning to the resonant frequency is key here. Like trying to slow down a kid on a swing, timing is everything.
I have an even easier and cheaper solution. I cut some little rectangles of the packing foam that my Ender 3 shipped in and put them under the feet. It definitely reduces noise, and the foam has some slight give that should provide good dampening. It would be interesting to see a comparison of that vs the printed feet.
See cnckitchen already been compared
hah. i did the same with my printer's packaging!
My solution is at the bed itself. The bed had an aluminum foil liner, foam liner, aluminum tape, spring loaded cams at the 4 post, screws run through a combination felt-silicone gasket with a plastic gasket up top of each screw. Not much vibration wise gets to the bed that isn't also present in the floor, desk, or even ground outside. However vibrations make it into the extruder and give their own set of resonance faults that on taller prints can be utilized for decal since they are incredibly predictable by time you get the bed dampened as good as you can.
Also helps to soak all your bearings in a jar of oil every few months, helps clean them up and makes them last a lot longer. Speaking as a poor boy that loved rollerblading and had to keep a good set of pig bearings going for years on end jumping ramps, riding on rough concrete and sometimes dirt roads.
For my MK3S, the best feet i've ever used, and have for years now, are the ones with 2yellow dotted squash balls by far. Nothing compares to them in terms of print quality and sound dampening combined.
What are they called? Do you have a link?
@@gavinsauer1608 There is one I found that looks pretty good, will print and try it out soon. Links on youtube comments are kinda finnicky, so go on printables and search for Yosuke (the person who designed them) or the exact title, "Squash ball feet for Prusa i3 mk3s".
@@gavinsauer1608 yeah what the other guy said. Most importantly make sure you get 2 yellow dot squash balls, they provide the best results. I tested other kinds of balls and these are amazing.
Been using on my cr-10 for 4 of 5 years!
I've always used the anti vibration feet on my printers for noise dampening, awesome to hear that I also got a free ringing reduction.
TH-cam recommended me this video, and it's an instant sub. Wished I found this years ago when discovered all of the stuff the hard way back in 2017 on my Anet A8. I already bought it heavily modified with a very sturdy plywood base, but it happened to have some ghosting. I thought a better base would be good, but I didn't wanted to remove the base, so I clamped to the table and still happening. Then I discovered that it was due to internal vibrations. You need to have your belts well tightened, have 0 play in any chassis bit, by 0, i mean 0, all screws well tightened up or it's a chance for ghosting to happening, every thousandth adds up, needless to say, to reinforce the chassis if you have a chance, also I swapped the linear bearings to bronze bushings, they were way cheaper, self lubed, and also better, because when the bearings start to wear, the small balls have a tiny flat spot and lead to tiny vibrations. Didn't tried the ceramic ones, but they are a good option. And finally I added some hot glue at the very top of the Z rod axis as it wobbled even with the modded piece. It secured the rod in place, and it act as a small damper. That are my 5 cents! Have a nice printing everybody!
the CNC kitchen style concrete slab + soft cell packing foam approach works great.
And sand in the extrusions also does a really good job, a bunch of the speed printing freaks use it.
Thing is that it varies so much about how printer has been done mechanically. There aren't universal guides to what is the best solution.
@@jothain the two things I described work on pretty much anything. Of course if the printer doesn't use extrusions you can't fill them with sand
I actually have all my printers on a sheet of MDF ontop of a piece of EVA foam floormat tile. This includes my Ender 3s and Voxelab Aquilas which those 4 are bone stock. I never seem to have any ghosting/ringing and my desk vibrations are more or less non existent as they can't even be picked up by some of the precision instruments I have.
Turns out I accidently did the same thing with some thick upholstery foam on my Wanhao D3 V1 about 2 years ago... I did it to isolate the vibrations of my 4988 drivers from my apartment floor to be nice to my neighbors. But I also just don't see much ringing in my prints, as I don't print those kinds of prints, so never noticed the correlation.
What about putting the printer o a sand bed?
Like filling a box with sand, puting some cloth over it to prevent sand getting to the printer and the printer on it to dampen the vibration?
Really interesting. And what a great space you have there. I’m quite jealous.
For those of us using Input Shaper, it’s really easy use that as a crutch and forget about passive vibration reduction. It’d be interesting to test Input Shaper with and without feet. The issue is you can only generate the Input Shaper settings with a stationary printer, as there’s no fixed accelerometer to use as a reference. If you put the printer on feet, Input Shaper won’t be able to distinguish the overall solid-body printer motion, from the tool head to bed relative motion (which is the only motion we care about). But if you calibrate without the feet, and then mount on the feet, the reduction in the relative motion provided by the feet would lead to Input Shaper over-correcting.
The only way around this I can see would be for Input Shaper to adopt a dual accelerometer configuration with one on the tool head, the other on the most rigid part of the printer.
You’ve actually just described an issue with input shaper that happens all of the time, not just with wobbly feet. The printer body always moves relative to its surroundings unless it’s bolted directly to a concrete floor and even then there’s still some flex in the printer. Using an accelerometer isn’t a perfect solution but it usually works pretty well because the resonances of the whole printer are often the same as those measured at the nozzle and bed. But there may be differences if you have very loose or flexible parts. What you really need is an accelerometer at the nozzle, on the bed and on the main body of the printer capturing acceleration in all dimensions, then cancelling out to show what the true nozzle to bed interaction is.
In practice, you could run input shaper before or after installing the wobble feet and it would likely work just as well. There is no such thing as over-compensating. Input shaper will not over-correct and cause different ringing patterns, that’s just not how it works. It reduces the motion over a range of frequencies by a certain percentage. The wobbly feet did not get rid of the ringing, it damped it so it was less visible. The input shaper will reduce the initial impulse that caused the ringing. They should actually work well together.
Are there any versions using two (print head + frame) or the very overkill three (print head + frame + surface/tale) accelerometers to account for that error you mentioned?
A maybe funny thing I learned in my career as a R1D technician: One client of us once came up with a solution you might not expect directly. They were developing a acoustic sound recording rig for determining the natural frequency and damping effect of metallic materials in order to predict the mechanical properties of their pieces by acoustics. They used tennis balls for dampening. The table that sat on the tennisballs had quite some weight to it. The bottom surface had the same spherical recesses as the balls. It did the trick perfectly. You basically want the same effect as for an ideal car wheel suspension: a spring for absorbing the first bump and a damper for absorbing the "echo". Imho, a 3D printer is a trade off between rigidity and speed. More rigid constructions will weigh more, thus slowing the process down or adding effects because of inertia of that weight. In CNC machines, lamellar cast iron beds are used for absorbing these kinds of effects as it has a high dampening effet by nature. basically everything that sounds dull when you hit it (no "tinggggg" but "df" when you hit it) should be contributing to avoiding these effects.
I would love to see your take on implementation of sand filled frames, or a printer housed inside an elastic bound tesseract frame. I had tried the stone platform on thick foam a while back, like CNC kitchen displayed one time, but I could find the proper thickness of foam, so the printer ended up tilting to one side as a default position.
I work as industrial maintenance guy from the past decade.
We do what is called the geometry of machinery in my mother language, not sure how they call it in English.
A thing I didn't learned from the school and experience was my way to get it right: vibration, alignment and other factors that can mess a machine must not be fight, but changed to the most ideal range.
There is always a working scheme that will make mechanisms resonate, so you calculate it in a way that the resonation don't mess the product.
Specially about vibration, the way to go isn't always making everything sturdier, but appropriately directing all the vibration to the machine's base (ideally by moving the center of mass down in the machine is a great feat).
Btw, a good way to go is reinforcing the structure in a way that you redirect that vibrations to somewhere it's not going to mess the jobs.
When woodworking, using a scroll-saw, there was an idea of building a 2” high box base with 4 dividers on the x and y. The dividers had 1/2”holes drilled half way up between junctions of dividers. This was then filled to the top of the holes withs sand. Then a top secured to this structure. The scroll-saw once secured to the top of this box, the vibration was reduced a lot. May be worth trying out. Regards.
I would of liked to see these vibrations tests on printers that don't have a moving Y-Bed, also I'm surprised you didn't go into the topic of input shaping and comparing that as well.
He's got an axe to grind with Klipper unfortunately.
Input shaper would be... interesting with a printer bouncing from a bungee cord.
I might try;
Oversize extrusions
Filling the unused slots in the existing extrusions with resin
Oversize drive belts
Higher quality belts
Diagonal bracing
Rubber dampers at structural joints
Interesting results, especially since I've had the exact opposite observations: Flexible feet made ringing worse, and while the paver didn't remove it completely, the resonant frequency and amount of banding changed dramatically (I use klipper on a heavily modded E3, and used an ADXL345 to measure resonances in a bunch of different configurations; as of right now, a paver, a layer of cork, and a rock solid cabinet is the best combination I've found for my setup, and the MZV input shaper seems to prefer working with the high frequencies that results in)
Guess the best part is that it costs next to nothing to print a set of those feet and just try it out, so even if the results vary there's nothing stopping people from checking for themselves
thats because a stiffer frame leads to a higher reasonating frequency (or just removing one of the frequencies). But without input shaper its the opposite. The wobbly printer makes the amount of mass needed to push against less when it comes to the hotend, so it doesn't have to vibrate as much.
Maybe attaching similar mass as the print head on the other half of the belt but moving opposite side would help balancing it out? Definitely worth trying.
So can this be the first in a series of videos leading to Input shaping?
What about levitating the printer with magnets?
I work in a machine shop, we use some pretty precise measuring equipment that can be affected by the vibrations of machinery. To lessen this we have granite blocks on the work benches with really squishy rubber pads on top, between the granite and the measuring equipment. Of course, this setup is for eliminating outside influences on the measurements, but I wonder if it would work for 3d printers
I suggest you try a test with a 3d printer on one of those concrete blocks, with a layer of soft foam underneath it. The foam allows for movement, while the concrete neutralizes some sound and lesser vibrations. Possibly the best of both worlds, imo...
I'm kinda surprised he didn't mention it. It was his own video of a few years ago after all!
I put foam pads under my Prusa which is then sat on a concrete paving slab years ago, done mainly to reduce vibration noise transferring to the surface it's sat on and works well, now I hear it helps with reducing ghosting, what a nice bonus :)
I agree. I use rolled up pads of shower foam mat. Decouple the table the printer is on from being a sounding board and the fine aircells and thickness of the pads quench the vibrations in the frame really well. In the couple of printers I've heavily modified, I changed all the steppers from 1.8 degree type to 0.9 degree type. Makes a big difference with the poorer quality stepper motor drivers. you can also experiment with wrapping the centre of support struts with something heavy like coils of solder, over a wrap of foam shower mat. Everything that makes a noise that you have the freedom to do this to. Cork gaskets from frame to stepper motors is another option.
so this was basically a really good ad for ender printers
I have a 3D printer with a steel frame and some substantial ringing with the default setting.
But when I reduced the acceleration from 3000 or 5000 to 500, I had no ringing at all, but the print was noticeably slower, because of course it took some time to pick up speed after it stopped or after one axis needed to start from zero at an edge of an object.
So I use an acceleration of 1000 as a compromise with very little ringing and only a bit reduced overall printing speed.
Some time ago I did some research on the relation between print time and acceleration. The effect is surprisingly small. Print speeds are so slow that acceleration doesn't have to be set very high. The printer reaches its print max speed really quickly already. I am a printing quality freak and even reduced the acceleration to 150mm/s2. Perimeters are at 20mm/s and infill 60mm/s. I admit, my printer is slow nowadays because I went crazy with the settings. But quality wise, this thing works like a charm.
@@FrankyieFrank yes, exactly, it's a trade-off, more speed or more quality...
This is a great video. I think you should continue with your dampening project.
I work with CNC machining centers and I was thinking adding mass would have a more noticeable impact.
But adding dampening to the printer is an experiment worth doing. I also would be interested in what adding both mass and dampening would do.
But there is a point of diminishing returns where considerable expense will be added to cost of the printer.
I have personally used hard rubber aircraft engine mounts to reduce noise and vibration of a machine. They do not deform with heat.
The belts seems to be the main issue.. I have seen some new types of belt used in some new 3D printers and am curious if a different drive material would result in less ringing.
Belts and belt tension don't effect ringing all that much. There's some minor differences between cheap Ender level belts and real Gates belts.
@@chrismorrison9140 You sure about this?
I think the belt being too loose or too tightness would affect how much the X or Y would resonate when moving.
Belts transfer the stepper motors rotation into movement for the X and Y.. So it would ringing would be affected by how tight or loose the belt is.
Would have been good if the video did some ringing test based on belt tightness level.
@@chrismorrison9140 I’ve seen a significant difference at certain speeds and tension, especially over time as they wear. Keeping them properly tensioned makes a huge difference with ringing (on certain machines).
Great video Thomas! Great to see some myths busted in an easily digestible format. I would love to see more videos going into depth on topics of what actually matters when it comes to expensive parts vs cheap parts and how some solutions might be very good from a theoretical standpoint, but infeasible from a marketing standpoint such as "sand in the printer frame" that you mention. Keep up the good work :)
If you really fill it up with sand you could also test the squash ball feet because they are often recommended for dampening and I heard of them since I got my first printer years ago but I've never tried them. Great video btw!
I'd love to see the sand filled frame. I thought 'more ridgid, more weight' would be better - not sure if it really would, but if that's the case - Lead filled extrusions would be worth a try too. (just put endcaps of other material to stay lead-free contact, etc)
Instead of lead i would use tin similare properties but non toxic
My thing that many in the Anet group have tried with success...Is to mount the machine hard to a plate of MDF/chip board like countertops are made from. Ideally a counter top cutoff that can be cut and glued back to back leaving the laminate surface on both sides. This is 1.5 to 2" thick and leaves 6-8" beyond the printer base. You can put feet on the bottom of this plinth, I used wine corks to make 3 feet. The resulting base is HEAVY and dense, but does not ring like concrete. Quiets it way down.
I've always gone for the concrete paver on a wobbly/cushioned/springy support - originally, I did this purely to keep non-trinamic printers from resonating through benchtops and amplifying the sound, but between using that base and turning down speeds, I've seen ringing practically disappear.
Still very much looking forward to getting my hands on a Klipper printer someday and setting up true resonance damping with an accelerometer, but for now, this is working reliably enough :)
tennisball sized bags filled with sand, put under the rubberfeet would be interesting to test. quick and easy solution for everyone.
had the first print these days where ringing was a problem, so perfect timing.
Actual tennis balls with various fillings may even be good; typically you'll want some elasticity along with the dampening!
Perhaps the trick to the effectiveness of the CNC Kitchen-style paver/foam block combo is due to the paver spreading/evening out vibrations, while the foam allows them to pass through to some extent? With just the paver, you're adding rigidity but not really doing anything to dampen vibrations.
Firstly put it on floor instead of table. It really helps to dampening the vibrations.
Ender 3 pro is tower-like printer, printer will vibrate more Y direction than X direction in same speeds because of mass of the bed.
Optionally connect to the wall along Y direction (if you can)
I know you hate the community of klipper but put aside of your bias and install it for INPUT SHAPING. Don't forget the accelerometer. (If it is hard to install klipper just install fluidd or mainsail).
When it sits on the floor and calibrate input shaping then print it. When you want to move your printer another location calibrate because natural frequency changes.
As a mechanical engineer I could say: if you want to change natural frequencies range of your system you have 2 options.
1. Add more mass (direct connection to floor includes this)
2. Spring and dampening elements
which both makes your system's natural frequency jump to another range.
3D printers are not working with constant vibrations. Different accelerations comes with different vibrations. Because of that you have to calculate or simulate with every move of your printer. Input shaping nearly does this. According the calculated natural frequency values it cancels the vibrations with specified method of your choice (or automaticly chooses for you if you prefer that way)
I don't think there is enough empty space in those small aluminium extrusions to make a significant difference. But putting the entire printer in a bed of sand might help. But it would also cause issues as soon as the sand gets where it's not supposed to :D
You're right. Volume inside aluminium extrusions is ridiculously low. I suppose it _might_ have some effect to pour something like lead inside them and even then weight increase would be marginal. Sand though? Most definitely not going to be visible. If someone wants weight in profiles, I'd much rather just make brackets and slap some profile or heck even add another extrusion and fix them together.
I wouldn't mind seeing you try sand-fill, just because we often hear people muse about it and otherwise claim armchair expertise without testing it, but we never see any empirical demonstrations on TH-cam (that I've found).
Also, I would recommend a few other tests:
- Try the paver again, without anchoring the machine to it as a single body with fasteners
- Try longer versions of the damper feet, to cover more or all of the length of the base extrusion
- Try placing the damper feet at different rotations in regard to the orientation of the base, with both a single set and multiple sets
- Try alternate shapes for the damper feet. The current one damps the x OR y axis, but not both and not any tangents. One that can shift on two (cross) or three (triangle/hex) horizontal-plane axes or even in a round fashion (circle/bulb) might produce even better results.
- And someone else below suggested testing the damping feet at different locations along the base extrusion
For damping it might be worth trying magnetic damping. If you had a large price of copper and some strong magnets held in close proximity the magnets movement induces eddie currents in the copper block absorbing a lot of energy. Could put the printer on springs and have strong magnets on each corner above some copper blocks. Not sure if it would work but I think it would be cool to try.
There are different types of those feet, which one did you use exactly?
One of the best things i've found is marble and foam. I've got my printer on a heavy marble cutting board type thing with a chunk of 2" thick foam under it. The foam is the black stuff found in camera cases and pelican type boxes and such. I also use foam between the marble and printer.
So the setup is printer with small foam pads for feet on top of the marble, with a block of foam under the marble, basically the same size as the marble, and that all sits on a sheet of 3/4" plywood. Between all that it dampens and isolates so much that it's completely silent as far as resonance sounds and vibrations go, all i can hear is the motors and fans humming along smoothly, huge difference from having it bolted down solid to the plywood.
Some things i think would be interesting to try would be to float it on water, on air (like on an air hockey table, and on something like an air mattress) or on damping feet consisting of two unconnected flat faces separated by a layer of grease so it 'floats' on the grease film. This type of plate damping is used in lots of applications, like doing vehicle alignments and i suspect that finding the right viscosity grease would do wonders for x/y damping without affecting the Z axis.
When i got my printer the stock frame was a wobbly flexing mess, but it still printed well enough to print out a bunch of stiffening braces and replacements for the acrylic parts. As i stiffened it up all the problems started appearing like collisions, z banding and such, so i then had to stiffen up the carriages and do an oldham bearing on the z. When the frame was flexy, it covered up a lot of the problems with the flexy carriages, and once i got the everything rock solid and the Z floating free on bearings with the foam/marble/foam base everything just came together.
I'd love to see whether allowing the printer to roll along marbles would help. This would allow for small movements parallel to the table surface, with very little resistance - to stop the printer from wandering, a set of feet could be made with very slight concave indents to enable motion, but keep the printer on top of the marbles. To provide even better damping, a layer of foam could be used to interface each concave foot with the printer. Just a thought, and probably too much effort to put in when other very effective damping feet already exist haha
I have a cube-style printer and am pretty sure my open square bays are oscillating. Something as simple as tensioned cables could likely fix ringing issues with little cost and weight. Since you don't mind modifying this printer, try adding "guy wires" to the frame front to back on both ends. Also, regarding the ringing you see, is it happening in just one axis, or both? That's a strong tipoff on which axis needs stiffening.
When i was studying physics we had some delicate and very vibration sensitive equipment. We used to use concrete suspended from bungee cord...seemed to work pretty well combining two things you suggested.
Nah, the issue is that it is internally generated vibration. You need to go the opposite way. Compressed springs.
ive had fantastic luck with squash balls as the feet of my printer! They work extremely well and do the same thing the PLA feet do, plus they last much longer!
Yes please try the sand filing of the frame! It would be very interesting to see!!
Try magnetic levitation like you would for a laser table essentially you have a table for printer here and a post with two powerful ring neodymium magnets with the same pole facing each other it should make a extremely good vibration dampener for this task as well as one that will last a very very long time as there's not really any component where their
Seems unlikely this would dissipate the energy though. Even less resistance than the stretchy ropes.
I don't see anywhere you said exactly what accelerations you used, but at the ones I saw the printer moving at, ringing is a *completely* solved problem with input shaper.
Good timing
I've been worrying about fixing ghosting recently and wanted to know the best approach
Instead of concrete or sand, how about cast iron? That's routinely used as the body of machines because of its excellent vibration dampening properties.
Probably not ideal at the low frequencies seen here! But everything should be explored 🤓
Awesome video. I would love to see a follow up on what feet would have the best result. I'm currently using a different type of feet and they don't really bounce a lot, so I'm wondering if they're not too stiff.
When reasoning about why it works; it's actually no surprise that the feet work best, as you explained very thoroughly. With cars you have a thing called unsprung weight, that's everything that's not cushioned by suspension (which is basically all the tyres and brakes). You need a good spring/damper combination, to dampen all both the vibrations of the chassis and of the wheels, as it's impossible to prevent undulations due to road imperfections. That matches the function of the vibration feet. Also, you want to keep that unsprung weight as low as possible, especially in relation to the chassis weight. That translates to adding sand to the frame for printing.
This might be a dumb question, but... Could you use acoustic pucks as the feet? I use them for my stereo speakers on stands. I also fill my stands with sand, but for this conversation, let's just stick to how well the IsoAcoustic pucks reduce frequency spikes when room testing. They are a game changer when it comes to sound quality. I would love to see if this helps (I don't own a 3D printer, just interested in them). Also, products like dynamat can be peeled and applied to surfaces strategically to reduce high frequency vibration, which seems to be the culprit in lower quality printing. Hope this thought is helpful to someone.
Here’s a thought (apologies if already mentioned below, tl;dr)
-> How about magnetic damping? Put strong rare-earth magnets next to thick-ish conductive sheets (~1mm copper? ~3mm aluminum? - just wild guesses). Eddy currents create fields opposing the motion of the magnets, and the energy is dissipated in the conductor. X/Y seems to be where the problem is, so you could support the printer on ball casters above an aluminum plate, and suspend the magnets beneath it, very close to the plates. As a bonus, you can easily adjust the amount of dampening by moving the magnets closer to or further away from the plate. (Relatively weak metal coil-springs could maintain the printer’s nominal position.)
I wonder if it would help if you braced the frame with diagonal rods that have compliant bushes in them to absorb the vibrations, rather than the rigid rods that you see on some printers. Obviously making the frame of the printer out of heavier materials like steel is going to help, just by adding mass, but perhaps some rubber bushes here and there might help with the ringing. This of course would be a from-scratch build, but people are doing that anyway. I think I may have seen a few 3D printers made from steel, but I can't recall where.
Maybe try metal springs under the concrete too? For prudence. Great testing!
I think CNC kitchen used one of those concrete squares but put some foam under that, to supress the vibrations. I am using a similar setup and it works well, it is a lot less noisier and i saw some improvement in quality
+1 for the sand weighted printer video please
I use washing machine dampeners. They can be bought in hardware stores and you are supposed to cut them to size and put under washingmachines. They are made of cut up rubber and I think they work really nicely. It reduces noise by a lot, and it helps with ringing too.
Does rotating the feet 90° change the ringing 90 degrees?
No, because of resonances generally speaking happen at the "mechanical axis".
@kornelis bijker i wonder if stacking another set of feet 90 degrees rotated would help.
Glue, tape or zip-tie Koosh balls to the top bar of the printer. They absorb vibration and dampen harmonics.
When using feet or paving stones on the printer frame you're relying on the print head's harmonic oscillations to resonate with frame and the dampening is applied to the frame. It may be better to have dampening forces applied to the print head carriage directly (and separately for the print bed) with a secondary belt that's just a tensioned elastic cord parallel to the drive belt/ direction of movement. This would apply retarding forces only when the print head "slips" past its expected location due to the resonance at a fast enough speed that the elastic can slacken on one side only ie. slipping on the rollers.
Sand filled beams work because the sand has little enough inertia to easily transfer the kinetic energy of the oscillating frames through their own resonance which is then lost through inelastic or stochastically elastic collisions with other sand grains but again requires the frame to quickly achieve resonance with the print head and bed. This is still alot better than nothing.
I think it would be nifty to go the other way and see how prints fair while the whole thing is on a vibration table. In theory the vibrations would be random enough to prevent any specific resonance frequencies from being met but that depends on how well built the machine and the vibration table are.
In astronomy, we use soborthane pads under the tripod legs to dampen vibrations in the telescope mount as the telescope is moved. It seemed "obvious" therefore that you'd need to find the right resonant frequency of the 3d printer. Perhaps try different feet (by design or material) that has different damping characteristics and see which works best? I suspect the pink feet you used are too inconsistent, so could try different foam/rubber/etc pads or even soborthane and see how those work?
I wonder how well a counterweight system would work on a printer IF it was designed in from the get go, it'd be harder to implement on a Ultimaker style system or V-Wheel system (unless you can find the space for an additional carriage on each axis) but for most of the others it would just take an additional rail and mass and attaching it in opposition to the part that's moving
The bungee design was used by early afm (atomic force microscopy) users to decouple the building vibrations from the instrument. There is a tutorial online for a home diy version. Concrete slabs also ring. You need a honeycomb platform such as used in optical tables or a terrazzo plate with dampening feet. The terrazzo plate is sold to reduce vibrations when weighing on a high precision balance.
Perhaps try damping on the axis itself. I have 2 different ideas:
1) Linear damper. Essentially a very light duty version of the shock absorbers on a car. Not sure you'd find anything ready made to fit the application, and tuning it right to allow the regular axis movement while damping oscillations may be hard.
2) Add a weight (approximately) equal to the weight of the mass being moved on the axis on the "return" side of the belt, so it would move in the opposite direction. Probably easiest to test this with the extruder head, you would need something equal in weight to the extruder head that would run on the back side of the same extrusion as the extruder head. The opposite motions should (somewhat) cancel out. The downside is the stepper now has to move twice as much mass and so may not be able to hit the same acceleration rates.
What about placing the printer on a thick piece of dense sound dampening foam? The stuff the looks similar to carpet padding.
I'd love to see that suspended cube setup in action
There is a version of the anti-vibration feet for Enders as well (same link)
LOL STEALITY!!!
Great look at how to remove ringing. Interesting that the concrete did not help which has always been something that people say works!
In terms of noise reduction there are several routes. One is isolation (like suspended mode), another is changing frequency (in general fundamental frequency (Hz) = sqrt (k/m) whre k is the rigidity and m is the inertional mass) up (by lowering mass and increase stiffness) or down (by increasing mass and lowering the stiffness).
Now for a CNC or a printer you need certain stiffness for sharp turns.. so increasing stiffness is generally a good idea (more stiff belts, more stiff axis with heavy duty linear bearings) all while keeping a lightweight approach (so you want to increase the stiffnes by a lot more than what weight you added), and this will get a very high frequency of resonance on the axis. Then the frame will need to absorb those vibrations.. so here a lower frequency is desired but not by making it flimsy (you need as much stiffness as in the gantry) but adding a lot of mass to it. High frequencys from the gantry are killed by a huge inertional mass that can't resonate as fast (the frame and mount on the floor). So this is the CNC route - > as stiff as posible with cast iron frame with concrete poured feet in the factory floor. (or even better are pillars dug deep in the earth rather than the factory floor to keep the noise down as the huge building might be too flimsy and its walls act like speakers if the CNC shakes the floor.. isolating the builing from the CNC with it's own sepparate foundation is a great way to quiet it down).
Solly to avoid ringing, a low enough stiffnes might avoid ringing by losing the edge of the corner.. making a not as sharp turn and experiencing less acceleration, but that is cheating and making subpar parts.
Of course there are plenty of other tricks like having active dampeners to absorb any resonance wherever is needed.. so a printer can have active resonance dampeners on the belts, on the axis rods, on the frame if it's less rigid and vibrates, etc.
First off I am a novice when we are talking 3D printers
That being said I own 2 and although I'm still learning have managed to dial them both in fairly well
For a living I am a commercial transport refrigeration mechanic, I'm not as young as most of you so when it comes to my various trades and certificates I've been around the block a bit
One of the things in all my trades I've done that remains true to this day is the most simple issues are often made complicated
Regarding my printers (every machine is different in some small way even identical ones) they are both mechanically sound and my Firmware settings work well for them
To reduce and almost eliminate ringing and ghosting I simply turned my jerk settings in the slicer programs down very low (8mms in Cura for example)
Such a simple solution to what is actually a simple issue
Nothing is perfect, even my cheap 3D touch sensor buzzes with my settings too high.
But that should not ever stop us from trying to improve on current technologies be it mechanical or computing using HMI's
If you really want to reduce friction harmonic vibrations you could always use iridium magnets and electricity and instead of using DC voltage to drive stepper motors use that same Gcode to power up or down the coils using AC voltage
Much like one of those trains that glides over the tracks rather than on them
Maybe Elon Musk will design a printer that costs 100k but prints absolutely perfectly lol
This is the kind of video we need more of. Absolutely would love to see the difference between a frame filled with sand or not; but I suspect you'd need quite a chonky frame (4040) to see much difference - you need to fit a lot of sand in there. Damp sand would probably also be better. Also, damping is not the same as dampening, people, but dampened sand may help damp your printer...but may also dampen it to much. Damn(p).
Tom very informative experiment, always learning something new with your videos ! stay safe keep up the great content !
I wonder if the damping method they use to earthquake proof high-rise buildings could be somehow adapted. Basically they have a massive weight at the top of the building that's free to move. It counteracts the movement of the ground and keeps the building from resonating itself to pieces.
Your Benchy has a deformation at just a few mm off the base. I had this and, while it may not be your problem, I did look at my slicer output. The particular STL I got from thingiverse (there are several benchy), was slightly corrupted. Each of the starter layers was repeated. If you scrolled through the head movement in CURA, about 1/2 way through layer 1, it did layer 1 again. This was repeated for 2, 3, 4 for several mm. Pulling the stl into my cad program it warned me the stl had problems. So, I got a more 'official' benchy from another source and it was not bad like the first. And, now I don't have those flaws a few layers up.
At 12:19 : Did you axtually mean Prusa Mk2 or Prusa i2. Shouldn't the i3 mk2 be similarily stiff as the i3 mk3?
What's the likelihood that the printed feet are introducing a destructive interference wave?
I think you can get different results using damping feet with different spring stiffness. I'm thinking The reason why the suspended setup doesn't work is because the frequency that the bungee cord allows is way too small to counteract the higher frequencies of the printer frame. I think you need a tighter spring or firmer damping feet that can better match the frames higher frequency resonances. Just an idea.
0:54 He uses triangles instead of pixelation to match the channel branding and I love that
Could a pendulum work? Like the ones used in skyscrapers but for earthquakes 🤷♂️
Very interesting video. Thank you. Instead of filling the frame with sand what about placing the printer on a bed of sand, a bed of sand that has a very flexible cover such as rubber in order to reduce the mess, or have the printers legs rest on balls of sand (similar to the balls that people massage to supposedly reduce stress)? It would be interesting to see what impact they have on prints. Thanks again for all of your work.
I've got my Ender 3 on handballs, which are rubber but under-inflated. They seem to dampen everything exceptionally well - I never see ringing, despite adding a layer of glass to the bed and moving the extruder motor to the print head with a cheap direct drive conversion kit.
That said, actually measuring the resonant frequencies and having the firmware adjust acceleration on the fly to cancel out ringing is the most effective approach.
I really liked the minimalist editing
Would be interesting to see what happens with if you put some linear sliders below the printer so that it can move on y and x. Then putting the dampening force on the height of the moving mass (of either axis) should help a lot of keeping stress off the frame. I am assuming that's the oscillation of the frame is around the forces trying to turn it into a parellelogram instead of a rectangle.
Interesting test. Did you see any difference in performance if you printed in a different direction? Normally adding mass to the part you want to stop movement on and adding a dampening material in between is the way to go and is commonly used for sensitive instruments . It might be easier to test on a Ender 5 - add mass to the z axis and some rubber mounts. This might tell us what part of the frame is resonating.
Hi Thomas,
maybe "Alu-Butyl" or someting similar (Car-Hifi) could also help. Small parts could maybe be put on the moving parts to kill some resonances. I would be very interesting if you would try that out. Alu-Butyl is something many of your viewers could also try at home with their stock printers as it is fairly easy to apply, not too expensive and could be revoved with the right solvents.
Best regards from Mannheim, Johannes
One of the DIY markets in Germany is selling or used to sell cardboard filled with sand that you can put behind drywall or under your favorite kind of flowing to dampen noise. So using sand is definitely beneficial.