V Slot Wheels / Bearings – Highly recommended Upgrade

Wheels – Bearings – they’re critical, load supporting and a highly recommended, immediate upgrade for your printer….only 6 are critically needed – 9 will upgrade the Y and X axis – if you’re feeling flush, 15 will do the whole printer!

The V slot wheels on the Y axis that came with my Duplicator 9 were a bit squished in transit…I tried to squish them back together but it quickly became clear that these weren’t quite circular and had an eccentric wobble that transmitted up to the Y build plate.

I tried a few times to use the printer, but the build plate would quickly sag at the rear, making the plate off level to the point where it interfered with and hit the rear microswitch!

 

I guess I needed new ones

You can really see here that the bearings have just popped out

Some close ups below of the carriage that holds the wheels – At this time I didn’t realise that you could just unscrew the wheels without removing the whole bed!!

 

Found a lovely chap on Ebay 

Selling what look like Polycarbonate wheels for what seemed, a quite reasonable £2.50 each including post (for a pack of 10)

10pc Xtreme Delrin Wheel V Slot 3D Printer RepRap CNC Openbuilds shapeoko XCarve

No idea what material they are, but using 9 of them – 6 on Y and 3 on X….it’s made a MASSIVE difference to the handling of the printer…the build plate is so much less ‘wobbly’ is the biggest notable difference.

After replacing these, I simply levelled the bed, configured Z axis (with the new 1.6.1 firmware)