A1 Alignment

The Assembly Wiki has some information posted by Eugene B on the alignment process he used. TL has posted a T1 Tuning Instructional Video, announced in this forum thread that includes both alignment and first print information. Please review both.

First, before we continue, If you are a klutz like me, and are prone to dropping tools, you might want to consider covering up your boro glass bed while you are working on some of the alignment steps. Boro glass is tough stuff but I still don't want to find out if it will break when I drop a screwdriver onto it!

Second, you should install a properly sized bolt for your Z Endstop. Page 4, step 44, of the Aluminatus TrinityOne Assembly 2003-06 document indicates that your Z Endstop bolt should be an M3 x10 or x25. The Assembly Wiki, under Make Z-axis endstop switch functional, reveals that it really needs to be 40mm long. I didn't have anything like that in my "goodies bag" of parts so I substituted a 1.5 inch 4/40 bolt.

You want to do it now to prevent things like the extruder head, or the dial indicator I'm going to use for setup, from crashing into your boro glass surface.


Let's tally up the items that still are loose.
The bolts that hold the X-Carriage to the X-ends.
The bolts that hold the Anti-Backlash (AB) nuts to the X-ends
The bolts that hold the Rod Clamps for the smooth rods at the Gantry Top. 

Start by measuring the distance from the smooth rods to the edge of the gantry at the bottom (where it's fixed)
Then adjust the Rod Clamps at the top of the Gantry so the spacing is the same.

next. do the same for the Z-axis feedscrews
tighten the bolts that hold the antibacklash nuts on the X-ends so that the spacing is the same.
Review Eric's Tuning Video. I'm going to suggest you fine tune the feedscrew positions by moving the stepper motors. But I'm also going to suggest that you do that after you have the x-axis level and the Xends bolted in place.

I'm already wearing reading glasses so I don't trust my eyes for leveling the X-axis. Instead I mounted a Dial Indicator in place of the extruder. I don't have a link to the forum thread, but here is a sample dial indicator printed mount. I have the chicken & egg problem as my printer isn't printing (yet), so I made do with an older technology solution. That's a corner nailing bracket from the local Home Depot's lumber department. Make sure you hold the bracket with pliers when you drill out the holes. Sheet metal spinning around on the end of a drill bit can inflict some nasty cuts.


Start at the center of the bed and set the dial to indicating zero.

Move to one edge of the bed  and take a reading. We are .011  high on this side.
Move to the other edge. Here we are .009 low on this side.

Manually turn the feedscrew on this side until you read zero.
Then go to the opposite side and adjust the feed screw there.

Repeat the process, going from side to side until the X-axis  is level.

Again, starting from the center of the bed and a zero setting on the dial this time move the bed in the Y direction
Take measurements at rear of the bed

And again at the front of the bed.
 Unless you put in bed leveling screws of your own design there are no "adjustments" to level the bed. If you look closely, you'll notice that I have not yet attached my Kapton heater to the heat spreader. (You can see it drooping down in the center in the picture at left.) It's the reason my bed isn't level in the Y-axis. I'll postpone any Y-axis bed leveling (by shimming the corners) until after I attach the Kapton Heater.
Now that the bed is level, make sure you tighten up the bolts that hold the X-axis to the X-ends.

Once you've done that, go back to Eric's Video and fine tune the Z-axis feed screw placement by moving the motors around until there's minimal movement at the top end of the feedscrews as shown in the video. If I had not seen it in the video, I would not have known there was any play in the motor mounts. Once you have the feedscrews tuned, put your extruder back on and set the Z-axis endstop to zero by adjusting the bolt you installed at the beginning as shown in the Video.

At this point, having looked at Eric's Video a couple of times I threw all caution to the wind and said what the heck! I grabbed some PLA filament (it supposedly being easier to work with than ABS) and decided to try printing a Calibration Cube. I used the version of Slic3r packaged with Pronterface (0.7.1) and used the default settings. I made no effort to compensate for the actual size of my filament. I loaded the part, ran the slice and then printed the result. I was so excited with the results I forgot to take pictures of it on the printer before removing it, but the following will give you an idea of what to expect.

The original print had a one extruder wide ring around the cube.
The results were far from perfect. I had a first layer adhesion problem with what was the rear corner of the cube.

My 20mm (.787 in) cube measures .778/.780/.778.
The 3mm (.118 in) PLA filament I used measures .108/.114/.115 (end/middle/end) for a .112 average.
So it's not surprising that the cube is undersized!

However, considering the un-optimized state of affairs for this attempt, I consider this "First Print" to be a SUCCESS!!

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