Bad X axis shaking in enclosure
Hi! I recently bought myself a Prusa original enclosure for my MK3 and have been dealing with quite a number of issues. I've been slowly figuring out my way around most of them, but there's one recurring problem I've made almost no progress on figuring out. At the moment, I'm dealing with some pretty nasty X axis shaking whenever my printer is in the enclosure - and I haven't been able to figure out what the problem is. I think the shaking appears to be more noticeable with the extruder around the top of the printer frame, and it seems to be mostly limited to X axis movements. When doing sudden start/stop motions with the X axis, I can see the printer's frame visibly shake left and right when the extruder stops moving. The weird thing is that this really seems to be limited to inside the enclosure - I've tried taking it out of the enclosure and I basically can't see the problem happening at all once it's on a stable surface. I would normally try to ignore something like this, but there's definitely far more noticeable wavy VLAs on my prints since moving into the enclosure - and I can't think of anything else that would cause a problem like that. Plus, the shaking is just -really- visible.
So far I've already tried a number of things:
- Checked for warp in the printer frame. If it's warped, I sure can't see it - I've tried putting the printer onto a glass surface and following the instructions on Prusa's website, I tried pressing down on various parts of the frame to see if the printer would lift up. As far as I can tell, it's absolutely perfect in this regard and doesn't lift at all.
- I've messed around with the rubber feet a number of times now. I'm still somewhat suspicious of them - only because I've noticed that when the printer is out of the enclosure, I can't easily slide the rubber feet around with my hands when it's sitting on the ground. When it's in the enclosure, I can't do that for the rear feet - but some of the front feet I can still move around a bit with my hands - which makes me worried that somehow the printer is getting lifted up slightly in the front or just not having the rubber feet fully make contact with the bottom of the enclosure. I guess to clarify if anyone's wondering - I did make sure the feet are locked by rotating them. Regardless though - I'm not sure what else I could do to test this short of buying new rubber feet - which seems a bit silly to me.
- I don't think it's a problem with a cable lifting up the printer. I was originally a bit suspicious maybe the LCD cable was causing this on the left side, even if I totally unscrew the LCD screen and hold it in my hand so the cable isn't touching the bottom of the frame - it doesn't appear to make any noticeable difference.
- I've tried putting my enclosure on the floor, and made sure it doesn't seem to tilt when I press down on any of the corners to confirm the surface it's on is stable.
- As far as I can tell, it's locked against the anti-vibration things on the bottom of the case just fine. I've tried moving it back and forth to try different positions I've seen in some of the photos in the assembly guide, but it doesn't make any kind of difference
I should note: I've already poked Prusa's support about this and they're going to try to get back to me soon, but in the mean time I figured it couldn't hurt asking here as well - especially since there seems to be very little information on this that I can find on the internet, so I'm sure someone in the future might appreciate whatever the solution to this problem is being documented here. Perhaps it's normal and my VLAs are coming from elsewhere, but even the customer rep I talked to seem to think there was more shaking then normal.
RE: Bad X axis shaking in enclosure
(after some further investigation - I'm not entirely sure I'm seeing VLAs? But still, this printer does seem to be shaking a lot
RE: Bad X axis shaking in enclosure
Good news everyone! I am not totally certain yet, but I believe I may actually have figured out the problem? The other day I noticed that my Y belt felt a little wonky, so I decided to pull the printer out and re-adjust the belt tension. Since doing that, I still see it shake a bit when moving the X axis - but it's significantly improved compared to before, to the point I'd say I'm comfortable just ignoring it or stabilizing the enclosure otherwise. So I guess if you've got a new enclosure and fighting with this issue: besides the obvious (rubber feet, stabilizers) definitely double check your belts. I think at least one person briefly mentioned this somewhere on this forum before.