A little over a month ago, the unthinkable happened - my Form 1+ broke down. Long story, short - I bought a Form 2 to do my day-to-day business. However, I wasn’t keen to pay the 900 euros to have the 1+ repaired. Especially when I had diagnosed the fault down to a broken y-axis galvo.
Enter @DavidRosenfeld: a gentleman who saw my plight and offered to sell me his spare galvo for a pittance, just to see what would happen. His was an x-axis galvo, but I thought, “let’s give it a try”.
For those of you that don’t know, here’s what the galvos look like:
So, I changed my faulty galvo for David’s, ran it up, and… nothing. I investigated further and found that the difference between the x and y axis parts is the little mirrors on the end - this is the original (broken):
and this is the replacement:
I think we can all see the problem here. This is the point where I thought “screw it” and bathed both the mirrors in a jar of acetone:
this dissolved the glue holding the little mirrors in place. With this done, I glued the old mirror onto the new galvo.
I then set about calibrating the galvos. I got the method from this guy: Form1+ Laser mirror calibration made easy - YouTube
Essentially, what you need to do is create a cross pattern, centered on your build plate, like this:
And match a centered cross on a spare resin tray:
Then, you just run the print, gently turning the galvos by hand until you get a result like this:
The next problem was that I couldn’t tighten the holding socket for the galvo without it shorting out the galvo. I don’t know if I’d shifted something in the part with all the transportation, etc. or if it was of a genuinely different part that wasn’t designed to be tightened in that area. Either way, I couldn’t tighten it without shorting the printer, and I couldn’t leave it loose and print.
Enter Sugru:
I left this for 24 hours to harden, and tried my first test print with an earring model:
I used a 3rd party resin I had handy, and this was the result:
Would I now trust this printer with my livelihood? No, probably not. But for a small cost, I have a working backup, and a very happy 13 year-old who now has a 3D printer in his bedroom!
