How to replace all my bearings?
Does anyone have a concise guide to replacing the bearings on the MK3/MK3S? I have my LMU8 replacement bearings in-hand, but my printer came preassembled, and I'd rather not . wade through fifty different manuals to find each assembly / disassembly step to get at each bearing on the printer.
Is there a one-stop-documentation for replacing the bearings on the printer?
RE: How to replace all my bearings?
Not to my knowledge. Unfortunately, your best bet (especially since you bought preassembled) is going to be to follow the assembly steps in reverse until you get to the bearing install step. Probably not the answer you want to hear, but that way you will always know exactly what you need to do to reassemble things (go forward again) and you'll learn more about how your printer is put together.
There are some shortcuts that can be taken, but I would recommend against them as a beginner simply because it's easy to make a mistake and damage something or get lost and not know how/what order things go back together.
You don't need to do *Everything* in reverse, just the assembly steps for:
-> Bed/Y Axis (More or less standalone if Z is high enough and you're careful)
-> Extruder (in order to actually get the bearings out of the carriage) and then X axis
-> Z Axis (best done with extruder disassembled).
RE: How to replace all my bearings?
Ouch. You should have done that before assembling the extruder for your MMU upgrade as you'll have to mess with everything and go through the calibrations and Live Z all over again ☹
@vintagepc is correct that you pretty much need to go in reverse order, but it's not that hard. The worst part is that you should disconnect the extruder from the board and fish all the wires out so you don't have to worry about dropping it.
Since you are going to have to tear down your Y axis I would recommend looking into these two mods:
- https://github.com/PrusaOwners/prusaowners/wiki/Bed_Leveling_without_Wave_Springs
- This allows you to really dial in your bed well. It is time consuming since you only want to adjust a single screw at a time and each test takes a minute or so.
- https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2786671
- This provides you much more control over your Y belt tension.
I too bought my printer pre-assembled and was nervous to do all this, but if you could handle the MMU assembly you can handle changing your bearings.
RE: How to replace all my bearings?
Thanks to both of you! Yes, I'll wait until my MMU2 is dialed in before I take this on. Bookmarking this for later!