350mm Voron 2.4

This is my 350mm x 350mm Voron 2.4 that I have build over about 2 years. People say that when building a voron you should build the base machine first and then upgrade it once it's built. While I chose not to do it that way in order to save money, I definitely would recommend to someone looking to build one to do it the way everyone says. Overall it's a pretty standard 2.4 build with some slight upgrades and modifications. It runs off a Raspberry Pi 4, and Octopus Pro V1.1 control board with tmc2209 servo drivers. The tool head is mounted to a CNC Tap v2, and is ran off of an EBB36 that communicates with the Octopus Pro over can bus. 

I cut the build plate out of 1/2" ALCA 5 cast aluminum plate myself at work using a waterjet. I had planned to counterbore the build plate to be able to insert 3/4" magnets into it, but at the time I was not comfortable with using the milling machines at work, so I just skipped adding the magnets and figured I would do it later. Now that I do feel comfortable with adding them, I plan on doing it the next time I have the printer down for maintenance. 

The outside of the printer is enclosed with 1/8" aluminum sheets that I also cut out at work on the waterjet. These were pretty simple to design and cut. I plan on adding a door to the front of the machine at some point, I just haven't had the time. I have the aluminum extrusions, glass plane, and hinges ready, I just need to add some counterbored holes to the extrusions to be able to assemble the door. Having the entire printer encased in aluminum caused the inside to be pretty dark, so I stuck some led strips to the top panel which really helped to brighten everything up. 

A lot of custom design work and machining went into the gantry and tool head itself. When I initially built the printer, there were constant squeaks and creeks when the machine was printing coming from the gantry. I figured this was due to the parts that I had printed on my Ender 3 not being the highest quality, so instead of reprinting them I completely redesigned the gantry using 1/8" and 1/4" aluminum parts. The voron 2.4 uses a floating gantry design so I couldn't just make the printed out of aluminum without major redesigns. To keep the floating gantry I used swiveling rod ends from McMaster-Carr to connect the gantry to the z-axis, which keeps everything super rigid while still allowing each corner of the gantry to move. The new aluminum parts instantly fixed all of my previous reliability issues, and has made the machine extremely rigid. 

The tool head consists of the Voron CNC Tap v2, Slice Engineering Mosquito Magnum+ Liquid hot end, LGX lite extruder, EBB36, and CPAP parts cooling fan. Since I already had a completely aluminum gantry I decided to make the tool head out of aluminum as well instead of printing the parts. The central plate was simply waterjet cut out of 1/8" aluminum, and is responsible for attaching the hot end and extruder to the CNC tap, as well as giving the CPAP parts cooling nozzle a place to mount to. The block that mounts the hot end to the central plate was cut again on the waterjet from 3/4" aluminum. I then added the pockets and counterbored holes using a Bridgeport manual mill. Again, making everything out of aluminum really stiffened everything up, and also has the added bonus of transferring heat from the extruder motor to the water-cooled hot end. 

Another custom part I made was a water block that is attached to the stepper drivers. Once again, the profile of the shape was cut out on the waterjet, and I then cleaned the faces and added the through holes using a Bridgeport. These made a HUGE difference with how hot the stepper drivers get. I eventually would like to add water-cooling to the steppers themselves, I just haven't had the time to do so.