3D Printing Enhancements - Team Anthony, Ryan, Dominic, Zachary

Recently our school team assembled a 3D printer. We used the model Creality Ender 3 V2. The printer itself overall worked very well and was somewhat easy to assemble. However, we noticed a few parts of the printer that could use some improvement. One such component we wanted to improve upon was the cable design. As you can see, the cords themselves are a bit tangled and when trying to level the printer, sometimes the cords would get in the way. We searched for a way to fix this and make the cords a bit easier to manage. Online at thingiverse.com, we started looking for some things we could print. We found one idea online that allowed us to have a higher quality cable clamp than the ones the box provided. The clamps themselves are created using PLA filament.

The clamps are circular ones around 3.5 cm wide and around 4.5 cm long. They are almost claw-like, and they have this very interesting lock system where you can adjust the diameter of the clamp of the circle. This is very helpful because if you are dealing with tying together a wider cord or multiple cords, you can adjust to your needs. The clamps are also sturdy which is good to ensure they don’t break holding the cords together.

The problem that this solves is it allows our printer to lower the risk of possible damage to the cords. We might want to change up the design to make each ridge at the lock part to be deeper or have more ridges. This would make the clamps even stronger because it would make the lock part even better with a deeper ridge. Also, we used normal printing settings. Preheated our printer to PLA settings and made sure to autohome before we started printing. Midway through our printing process, we ran out of PLA filament, but we were able to continue just fine. Overall, this was a great addition to our printer and helped much. This is the final product after the cables were added. Here is a link to what we added.