I built a 6-axis 3D printer that could be groundbreaking!

Over the past couple of months

I developed a 3D printer

that is unlike anything else

and I firmly believe that this could be

the next step in 3D printing.

This system has multiple tools

running independent from each other.

Sounds a bit like an IDEX-system,

but where an IDEX-system

is only independent in one axis,

the system I developed

is independent in all three axes.

Therefore I'm calling it the TIME-system,

which stands for

True Independent Multiple Extrusion.

With this system it should be possible

to print totally different parts in parallel

or print the same part using multiple tools,

bit like the Autodesk Esher project.

But what I think is even more interesting,

is the possibility

to combine totally

different materials.

Think about printing glue

in each subsequent layer

to make parts stronger.

Or use concrete infill

to make parts heavier

or modify its center of gravity.

And there are more use cases that I can

think about and we are going

to explore that in future videos.

But first we need to put this thing together.

The base for our 3D printer is a grill plate

which I use because it's affordable,

heats up fast, gets hot and has a

convenient shape for our purpose.

The problem is that it warps when

it heats up which I found out

when looking back at the footage of last time.

Oh there's smoke coming out.

So we need to reinforce it.

and I used these aluminum profiles for that.

I made very professional engineering drawings

so it looks like I know what I'm doing

and started cutting the

profiles roughly to length.

I placed the biggest end mill

that I could fit in my mill chuck

and placed that on this small

milling machine I just bought.

It's not the most advanced machine,

but finally I can do some milling work.

Now the part that I like the least

tapping.

Therefore I printed this tool so I don't have

to think about tapping straight.

There I am sitting in the shed,

tapping holes and aluminum profiles,

all by myself,

alone.

Maybe that's a bit dramatic.

The next day I was ready to modify

the plate itself

I marked where all the holes must be,

centered them and started drilling.

This is the definition of not flat.

I lowered the speed of the milling machine

for the chamfering.

These chamfers make sure that

the plate can be mounted

without the screws sticking

out above the surface.

A bit of cleaning and I was ready

to mount the frame together.

I needed a flat surface though for this.

Oh wait...

my brother is working on this door

that has a large enough window that is flat.

Now everything is tightened well

and the next step is to mount

these beefy linear rails.

This rail assembly is mounted using

threaded rods with corner brackets

and compression springs.

This made it possible to adjust it

just like a regular 3D printer.

Pretty much all the parts that we need

are on this table.

And in order to make sure that

we have everything,

I used this checklist.

And this is the bill of materials

that is generated

by my design.

So literally every part

is in that design

and that design is here on my laptop.

So I can see where all the parts go

which are quite a few.

First we are going to work on this base.

And I have to remove this grill plate first

in order to access everything.

The diameter of these connector rods

was just a bit too big.

I was thinking of hammering them in,

but that would do more harm than good,

so I decided to sand them down.

File them down.

Now it fits.

I put the belt tensioners together,

lined everything up

and assembled the carriage blocks.

The last step was to add the timing belts

and adjust everything in such a way

that the opposite carriages

are perpendicular to the rails.

The movement system works!

Okay the base is put together,

at least mechanically

and everything went very well.

If you ignore the fact that some parts

didn't fit and had to do a redesign,

reprint them out of PLA to see if they fit.

And reprint them again

out of PET for these final versions

and then realizing

that I made another mistake.

Redesigning and reprinting again

and now we're here.

Okay I'm not very happy with how smooth

these rails go, well not smooth.

I cleaned them out with very thin oil

and also I greased them up.

Well you know you have beefy rails

when you need a grease pump for these.

I think it's good enough for now

but this is something

that I'm going to look into

for maybe a future version.

I already added the temperature sensor

to the grill plate

and also added this ceramic felt

to insulate the heater

from the rest of the electronics.

Speaking of which,

now it's time to add the electronics.

I'm going to reuse most of the electronics

from this original grill plate

that I've shown

in the previous video.

The reason for the new plate is well...

and also when I bought the new one,

the picture showed

that it didn't have this hole

and it was completely flat

which I thought would

make it easier for this purpose

but well for some reason

this isn't completely flat.

It misses the hole though,

but it's different from the picture.

So I'm going to change some things.

One of them is the PSU.

This is used for LEDs

and this is pretty small

and this one is 300 Watts

and the smaller one is 150.

So I'm going to repurpose most of this.

I will also add a second solid state relay

for the future possibility

of having a chamber heater.

I removed the electronics

from the old grill plate

and now it's time

to add it to the new one.

It must be oriented differently

and I didn't want to torture

my laser cutter again

like I did last time

when cutting in PCB material.

So I parted up with PCBWay

and they delivered a bare PCB

with all holes at the right location.

PCBWay is one of the most experienced

PCB manufacturers in China.

The process was very simple,

especially in my case where I only

needed the PCB outline.

I just uploaded files,

selected the required thickness,

clicked order

and now I'm here adding rivet nuts to it.

I could have all gone fancy with electronics

which would have been possible

because they can manufacture

high-end complex PCBs,

flex-rigid PCBs

and they can assemble them.

I used PCB only for

its mechanical properties.

Yet they also offer CNC machining,

sheet metal fabrication,

multiple ways of 3D printing

and injection molding.

Pretty awesome right?

That you can send your design,

select the manufacturing process,

select the material

and get a professionally

manufactured part back.

Thanks PCBWay for supporting the channel

and this project.

Okay it's a small miracle

not that this thing works

because I've shown that in the last video

but that everything fits.

I think that this is a

pretty solid grill plate.

I managed to connect most of the wiring.

I had to modify the springs in there

to make it fit, but it fits.

So the thing that's left to do now

is adding the portal.

I've already made one

earlier on to see if everything fits.

It's not perfect,

everything does fit.

I have designed an improved version

which is in parts here

and we will put that together later.

This thing

it is good enough

so we can use that as our first portal.

This thing is based on the truss system that I've

made a desk lamp out of.

And this is

coreXZ system.

So the motors are at the bottom

and if both motors

rotate in the opposite direction,

then the gantry goes up and down

and when they rotate in the same direction,

it will go from left to right

or a combination of the two.

And that's what I think

is an interesting

advantage of this system

is that most of the weight

is put at the bottom

It's better balanced when we are

going to fling this back and forth.

So I've printed everything

out of PET with carbon fiber

on the Bambu Lab

and with the lamp I used brass rods

but with this I used carbon fiber rods.

Everything is tensioned

with dynama wire,

but the tensioning system itself...

I'm not too happy with it.

So I do have an idea

for an improved version.

That's what we are going to try

with the second portal.

This thing it runs well very smooth

and the nice thing about the coreXZ

is that the gantry always stays horizontal.

It's not possible

to push one side down.

So it's it's a bit similar to having

two lead screws,

but this I think it's a lot more elegant.

And also it moves a lot faster

in the z direction

which can potentially be

interesting for non-planar 3D printing.

So yeah I think that this

could work very well

in this configuration that we're

building right here.

And it can also be tilted

at a 45 degree angle

so it can print like a belt printer.

So let's put this thing on the printer,

then we are going to put

the second portal together,

put that on the printer

and then we can do our first test print.

OK I've made the tensioning system.

And that's by drilling

two holes next to each other.

It wasn't the easiest thing to do...

I think it should work better

with the tensioning system

that I've shown with the desk lamp

because that was a clear bottleneck.

And it also should be

a lot easier to work with

than the tensioning system

that I've used for the other portal.

I also used screws for those

but made two flat edges on there

and I had to somehow

try and make a knot inside of here.

So, and with this system,

I can just

make the knot on the outside.

So I'm going to use

this Dyneema rope.

This is pretty strong

and it's easier to work with

than the Kevlar

because the Keflar were all loose strands.

And this is braided.

It's much easier to just push it through.

Well, let's see what happens

if I'm going to put it under tension.

So I'm just twisting it

just like I did with the lamp.

Huh, okay, this is 10 times easier

than it was with the other system.

Okay, I moved to this room

because I've got an example here

and I've got all parts lying here.

Everything was fun and games

until I realized that the heads of

those screws were too high.

So yeah, I had to mill them down.

Okay finally, after more

than three months of work,

this thing is put together.

So the only thing that's left to do now

is configuring it.

And that's also not going to be a

straightforward task

because we do have a

weird motion system here.

So therefore I'm happy

that I teamed up with Duet.

They supplied me their Duet controller,

which is controlling this whole thing.

And that's very convenient to configure.

They also supplied these tool boards,

the Revo Roto tool boards,

which can be mounted to

the Revo Roto from E3D.

I've got two of them.

And I think that they look

pretty cool on this machine.

So shout out to E3D and Duet

for these awesome products.

Maybe you're wondering why I'm not using

the Proper extruder

that I've developed earlier.

I didn't want to add

even more variables to this.

So I decided to go with some products

that are already out there

that do work together like these.

I'm going to turn this thing on.

Hopefully it doesn't blow up.

Then I'm going to configure it.

And hopefully we will see a

successful first test print.

Imagine this,

I put all my eggs in one basket.

I haven't uploaded a video

in more than three months.

How bad it would be

if this just doesn't work.

I believe so much in the system

and the possibilities

that we can explore in future videos,

that I decided to go all in on this.

I don't think that I

ever felt this much pressure

during making a video.

And it wouldn't even

be funny if this fails.

Okay, I think I managed to configure this thing.

It wasn't easy.

I configured it as a coreXYUV system

and swapped out the axes.

So technically it's a coreXZUW system

with an independent y-axis.

So yeah, TIME-system is a

much easier name to remember.

It works. So let me just show you.

Yeah, let's just home everything.

So first it will home. The first portal,

this is tool zero.

And then once this is homed,

the second portal will home,

which is tool one.

It has a bit of different

homing sequence than that one,

But they both home.

I managed to home them in parallel,

which looked much cooler.

But for some reason, the firmware said

that the second portal

wasn't homed properly.

The Z, by the way, is homing

all the way at the top.

It makes it much easier

when I'm going to tilt

this portal at a 45 degree angle,

the zero position of the Z-height

will be way different.

So when I'm homing it at the top,

I can just in software say

set a different offset

from this point to the to the bed itself.

So the Z right now is at the

maximum position,

so it cannot go higher.

It only can go lower.

Same with that portal, also with Y.

So V.

I can only do minus 100.

So we have six axes,

but we do also have two tools

tool zero and tool one.

And if I select tool one,

then tool zero moves to the side.

And now that one is selected.

And it's possible to remap

the coordinate system.

So right now, when I'm

going back to move

and I move the X axis,

then that one is moving

with the X axis and Y.

But for some reason, Z

is not. Z is still mapped to this one.

I think that this is where

I run into the restrictions

of the firmware.

But on the other end,

I don't want to use

the functionality of having

tool zero and tool one

to select between the two

because I want to print in parallel.

So the restrictions probably will be

in the slicer itself.

So for future videos,

I think I have to come up with

some sort of script or whatever

that I can manipulate the G-code with.

So, both portals are just

doing its own thing.

One other thing I want to show you is the

the let me put this microphone aside.

This is a tool change system

It's inspired by the tool change system

system that I've shown

in my very first video.

That's also why this tool board

is so convenient.

But this can be placed at a

90 degree angle.

So when I'm going to place this portal

at a 45 degree angle,

it can actually print like a belt printer.

It needs a pointier nozzle of course

in order to make this work.

But there's one stupid issue here

is that when I'm going

to move this thing up,

the cable collides with this top beam here.

So it cannot home.

But yeah, these are things that

I'm going to solve later on

when we are going to use this

functionality of this 45 degree portal.

But before we are going to

do our first test print,

I want to give a

quick shout out to my Patreon supporters,

especially these guys.

Your support helps a lot,

especially during this project.

It works.

I think that this is the best thing

I have developed so far.

Yes, it's silly with the grill plate

and those moving gantries,

but it works.

Right now it's just printing

with one portal,

but that will be different in the future.

I do have to be honest about something.

The quality of this print is terrible.

I still have some issues with the

synchronization between axes

and it also lacks the part end fan.

Still a long way to go,

but the hardest part is behind us.