I’ve been having trouble printing out the parts to use the linear bearings on the Y-axis. The bases have been coming through fine, but the ‘towers’ have been coming through as blobby messes. Lowering the temperature a bit has helped.

Following on from Julian’s suggestion, I had a look at the Easyfit software he recommended. Using it, I cloned the Y-axis bearing holder three times, so that I had four of the parts on a ‘plate’. My thinking was that by printing four parts, it would give the parts enough time to cool down between each layer. I set them up with 5mm between each piece, which worked great.

This was my longest print so far, at 57 minutes. This is how the parts looked when printing was finished.

 As you can see, I still need to work on my ooze settings, but the parts looked pretty good, with no melting around the ‘towers’. My theory worked well. Here’s the parts once cleaned up a bit with a Stanley knife.

I’m really pleased with them, and the linear bearings snap into them without any troubles at all. Next up was to print up an X-Carriage. The main option is Greg Frost’s X-carriage, but I went for Joem’s version, as it allows for four, not three, bearings. However, it’s very large. If it cuts down on the X-travel too much, I might have to switch to the three-bearing version. I also printed out the version with mounting points for a fan, which I think I’ll fit in the future.

This was an even longer print, at about an hour twenty. This print had some noticeable lifting off at one corner, which came up about 1mm. This won’t affect the performance of the part, but I might have to keep the bed temperature a bit higher than 100 degrees for these larger pieces in the future.