exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

So I need some sort of plan!

I think there are 3 main problem areas.

1) Moutning a soldering iron and adjusting the Z-home
2) Adapting the print head to accept 0.7mm solder as filament is generally 1.7mm.
3) I have no idea what I am doing.


So let's get down to my first idea for securely mounting the soldering iron..


There are a couple of obvious problems here. Mainly that it is not straight I guess and it needs a wider soldering tip for vertical soldering.

And the heat will melt the PVC tape, but that's a mere detail

stephen_usher wrote: 18 Sep 2023 11:38 And the heat will melt the PVC tape, but that's a mere detail

Should be good for up to 500c I recon anyway.

But yes, I don't think we should get hung up on mere details at this point.

That's insanely cheap for a 3d printer, I might buy one just to have it as a backup.

Can't you just use the 3D printer nozzle itself as the iron tip?

PaulJ_2.0 wrote: 18 Sep 2023 12:02 Can't you just use the 3D printer nozzle itself as the iron tip?

I did wonder, but 350-450c for a print nozzle is rather hot. Plus the nozzle will be in the way of stuff on the PCB. So it needs something like a iron tip to avoid hitting stuff.

Also get it all wrong and solder melts in the nozzle.. no way to unblock it.

Though I doubt it would give a reliable joint because the pad and part should be heated up not just the solder. So I think trying to print solder to a PCB PCB would just result in a lot of cold joints.

Been busy dismantling the printhead..


The first problem was to spring entered warp drive and vanished temporarily...



Thankfully the pulley ideler thingy-m-bob didn't have a terribly deep groove in it. Even though the pictures suck, about half of the solder width is still protruding the groove!


I adjusted for minimum tension and then had to tighten up a little bit. Thankfully this printhead is adjustable! The previous printers I had were fixed spring-loaded or had a "stepped" gear for 4 settings. So this printhead is absolutely fantastic the way it is set up!


Likely thicker solder would work better such as 1mm. But I don't have any larger and I generally use 0.7mm anyway. Ultimately I may have to go for a big one depending how well the solder goes through.

The expected problem is that the printer would not print because of "cold extrusion prevention". Thankfully this printer firmware supports turning that feature off!

https://marlinfw.org/docs/gcode/M302.html
Alas the first test..




It really needs some better to guide it, because feeding the solder through all the tubes and such is a bit of a pain currently. So I need something like a reducer tube to adapt 1.7mm to like 0.8mm or something like that. I may just bodge it with a syringe needle and just glue it in place.

The Teflon tube out of the printhead will probably solve the inlet guide problem.

The next problem is the solder is naturally bending around the pulley guide and missing the outlet hole. Really the whole is in the wrong place to start with :roll:


The only solution I can think of is again using a syringe needle to get it as close to the solder as possible to hopefully guide it.

EDIT:

Hmmm...


The problem mostly is that it would need to be at an angle in order to hook the solder. I wonder if it might just be simpler long-term just to reprint the lever section which holds the idler wheel...


There actually seems to be these proper feeders
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005622171029.html


EDIT:
Just realised I've got the in and out the wrong way around :roll:
So pretty much I just need to release to leave little bit and literally drop the solder through as I would ordinarily do with filament!

I wanted to reuse the head mounting bar thing. Geese getting it out of the print head was a epic effort!

I have their head heated up to around 150c before the rubber on the vise started melting. You would think they would make the rubber out of heat resistant material really :roll:

The headmount bar is back in place. Somehow it needs to be adapted to a syringe needle at some point. He though I will have to reprint the headmounted bar totally or just build some sort of adapter. Maybe I'll design a simple 3-D part for that task.



Without the fan needed on the motor and basically no need for the Z probe any more. It gives a lot of room and options for mounting the soldering iron...


For mounting purposes it would be better to have the top part of the iron clampped because obviously does not get hot. But then doing that means the solder would have to travel down a tube for further which could potentially lead to jams. So ideally I want to keep the tube feeding the solder as short as possible. But that then causes some potential mounting problems...