It's not what you think

Sorry for the misleading title

Today I committed to finally rebuilding the Tevo Tarantula 3D printer that's been sitting idle in my spare room for over six months.

This is how it's meant to look after assembly

When I assembled it the first time it took a serious toll on my sanity. The instructions were without doubt the worst I'd ever seen for anything in my life. I'd assemble the parts for one stage in the manual and flip the page to see there was 5 other things I should have done first. Sometimes I'd assemble something and find the instructions were so wrong I'd have to pull almost the entire thing apart and start again. It got so bad that I burnt the instruction manual in a ceremonial fire to release its demons and free me from it forever.

So I finally got the piece of shit together and somehow got it up and running but I was seriously disappointed. It was very flimsy and the frame had more rattles than two skeletons having a root on a tin roof in a fucking thunderstorm. So I pulled the whole thing apart and completely re-engineered it to my specs. I'll rewire the whole thing in the next few days as it looks like shit but it's working better than it ever has.

I inverted the Z axis(up and down) and added a second stepper motor and drive shaft to ensure the Z axis worked as it should. Then I added a dual rail Y axis(forward and back) to stabilise the base plate and give it a decent platform to print on. After that I completely rewired it and installed the mother board into a stand alone case so it wasn't hanging off the side of the printer like it was when it came.

After that I reworked the latest version the Marlin software (V2 bugfix) to accommodate the new dual Z drive in it's inverted position and flashed that to the mother board.

Here's a shot of some of the wiring, it's like a birds nest nest right now but I can fix that with a few plugs wires and sockets.

It's all so simple any idiot could do it.

So I just gave it a few trials to test it out and it's working like a charm. Now it's rock solid and all the axes run true with less deviation than my workhorse printer sitting in the corner of the room.

Source for the assembled piece of shit in its intended form

Source for the spider pic
https://all3dp.com/1/tevo-tarantula-review-a-3d-printing-fixer-upper/ https://www.orkin.com/other/spiders/tarantulas/