Side Mirror Assembly/mirror glass replacement

[Maritime-elf]

54947Happy New Years everyone.

Over the holiday I was replacing the glass on my side mirrors. I removed the old glass and then removed the part which holds the mirror glass. I was surprised to find I was missing one of the little reddish/orange pieces which either pushes the mirror up and down, and/or left and right. I called DMC Houston and they told me the reddish/orange part does not exist and I need to replace my entire mirror assembly. So my question is, rather then replace the entire assembly does any know where I can find the reddish/orange part which lives behind the mirror glass?

54947

[Gregadeth]

I just replaced my side mirrors today. It looks like there's three slots for those orange pieces. On mine I had only two of them on each side (driver and passenger), the top one was missing. My guess is these are just there for better alignment (or maybe the originally planned heated mirror functionality?). The center part with the screw is what drives the movement of the mirror glass.

5494854949

[Maritime-elf]

Hmm so even if I only have one of the red things I could put it back on. To be honest I never noticed any reduction of functionality but I figured if the drivers side had them the passenger side should too.

[Elvis]

I also had a missing red thing, the question is - why ?!?

If I remember correctly (>10 years ago) the mirror was less vibrating with two of these things.


How could it get lost ?
Was it ever installed ?

[dtavres]

Who knows how to do 3D printing? I bet those red/orange "studs" could be 3D printed pretty well.

[dtavres]

How did you remove the mirror?

Do you just "pull" it?

Do you need to get the red/orange 'studs' to pop out of their holders?

[Gregadeth]

How did you remove the mirror?

Do you just "pull" it?

Do you need to get the red/orange 'studs' to pop out of their holders?A heat gun and a plaster spatula to remove the mirror glass. Then undo that center screw to remove the back plate. The orange pieces easily pop in and out of the back plate, and they just slide into the slots on the mirror mechanism.

[Jonathan]

A couple threads about mirrors lately got me thinking about my own mirrors. My driver's side suffers from this looseness/missing orange ball-itis as well.

I got looking on the Houston page to see what the damage would be on a complete replacement for the driver's side mirror and found they are $205.08.

Here: http://store.delorean.com/p-7055-rear-view-mirror-rh.aspx

No comment on whether that price is a good one or not, because what got me perplexed is how it seems like they chose RH to be the driver's side mirror and the LH to be the passenger side. Am I seeing that correctly?

Just about everything else in the car you think of in terms of RH and LH sides when you are sitting in the driver's seat facing forward. Left front fender for example, RH taillights, LH parking brake cable, etc. But not the exterior mirrors. It's apparently backwards with those. Is that some sort of clever trick of how you need to sit facing forward and LOOK IN THE MIRROR and THEN they become the correct RH and LH sides?????? lol

[DMC-81]

FWIW, when I replaced my mirror glass there were only two red/orange parts on each mirror. I didn't remove the black plastic plate so you can just see a bit of the ball in the socket behind the plate through the slots. Like so:

Left:
http://dmctalk.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=37830&d=1446855745

Right:
http://dmctalk.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=37834&d=1446856489

I didn't even realize what those parts were, but after seeing them fully above, I agree they likely serve as two pivot points to facilitate/stabilize the movement of the glass.... the bottom one for the vertical movement and the side one for horizontal movement. If there is a top one, it looks like it is not visible from this view as there is not a slot for it like the other two.

[Shep]

Who knows how to do 3D printing? I bet those red/orange "studs" could be 3D printed pretty well.I mean, I literally started a company over far more complicated 3D designs than these studs:

55041

Reflectors are still considered the "holy grail" of 3D printing however and that plus the archaic DOT laws now relegate me to working within the OEM/1983 DOT confines. Not that I haven't spent countless man hours and prototypes trying to make it work however, but even teamwork from a fellow 3D printing guy with an optical engineering degree and an SLS machine hasn't been able to pull it off. Ultimately it's just the technology at play sadly, 3D printing is too rough for photons of light. Anyways, rambling side banter aside, on to the current design.

I'll reverse engineer this guy with OpenSCAD and Thingiverse this guy if someone can send me a peg, metal clip included. And heck, I'll print a bunch off too. Printing cost in raw materials and time and even electricity is at most 25 cents each, we're at the point where postage is far more expensive than the part itself, I don't mind. My printer's VERY capable of precise, dimensionally accurate prints, even more so than the ones pictured above (which was done on less-capable FDM hardware outsourced to a guy that convinced me to give him about $300 to pay for those three prototypes that are just abysmal in quality and have VERY visible brush strokes for color.). I have three sets of calipers, two digital, one manual, for ultimate in measuring cred. (Is that a thing? I'll make it one.)

For the metal tabs, cut up an old beverage can (beer, soda, pop, cola, whatever it's called in your area) and the natural curvature will help in making it more "springy". You'll need needle-nose pliers, I'd probably recommend the tiny Hakko ones (https://www.adafruit.com/product/1368) given the size of the metal, for filament type, ABS or PETG would work best, although I've found that M3D's ABS-R brand is a variant of PETG that reduces stringiness while also handling wild temperature fluctuations. To put it this way, PLA dash cam mounts failed within 24 hours. ABS-R mounts lasted the life of the car until I traded it in, so a couple years Roof window seat, literally the hottest part of that interior, a side cam too, stuff is durable and shouldn't flop around at all. ABS will snap if it gets cold, ABS-R has no such issues. Comes in all different colors, I don't think I have much red left (most of mine is now PLA for artistic purposes), but I do have PETG and ABS-R. In what seems like a cruel joke however, the only color I have is black. "Hey, that tiny part you just dropped, what color is it?" "Same color as the shadow below the car, you know, black"... yeah that's not a punchline I'm going for. I'll be ordering a legitimate color rather than just a shade from M3D soon, I'm low on filament already and they got some new stuff in I think (how do I have like every shade ever and no colors anyways?!)

[Maritime-elf]

Shep I can send you the peg...as long as you are willing to send it back with a copy. I sent you a private message get back to me if you are interested. :hihi:

[Shep]

Thanks for the reminder! I started to write up a response and literally got lost somewhere between my father-in-law painting our living room and running around town for supply runs. Still have it, but it was rambling and long and I was in between shortening it and distractions, so I will make this an open offer this time. Which is... still... long... (sorry, had a few points to address, so paragraphing each point to hopefully help readability/skippability!)

I moved into a new house end of February, so things are still very much a mess inside, and my 3D printers are offline until the "tech room" they're going into can be eradicated fully of mold. There's drywall that needs to be replaced before I will move anything into there, to absolutely minimize the effects of what gets airborne and spreads. In other words, I can't 3D print new ones yet. That said!!!

I am more than able to design new ones, even remotely if someone already has a peg and a set of digital calipers. Then, once I get my 3D printers up and running, I can 3D print off a few test pieces, and if they measure up right and people report successful fitments, I can print off probably a few hundred in one go if I felt like it and just keep sending them out to people as need be. I know Maritime-elf mentioned it being a good money maker, but, I've got slightly bigger fish to fry (http://dmctalk.org/showthread.php?p=230921&viewfull=1#post230921), so this will remain free, open source, and heck I can see about making "take - free" boxes (what do you call those?) available for DCS events maybe? Long-term thinking out loud.

Someone who has their mirrors apart remind me of the peg's function real quick: does that metal strip serve to add pressure that keeps the peg inside the black socket? I'm thinking similar to a leaf suspension at the moment.

As for dimensions, DMC was pretty bad at mixing imperial and metric in finalized designs for no rhyme or reason. Side markers for example are imperial and I've blueprinted down to minimum 1/4" increments, while the taillights are metric and I've blueprinted down to minimum 5 mm increments. I would not be surprised if this turns out to be a series of tiny imperial fractions, but I hope it's metric, for all of our sakes. You can usually move the calipers to visually check if a nice, more round number works still. If it does, it's probably spot-on.

I drew a mock-up of the peg in LibreCAD and put letters for the dimensions I would need. Can someone with digital calipers and a peg handy get me dimensions for the following?

https://i.imgur.com/0Pqq80w.png https://i.imgur.com/2JXrKEf.png

- - - -
A - Overall height of peg
B - Overall square width of peg
C - Height from bottom of peg to top of square section
D - Diameter of ball (might match B)
- - - -
E - Overall width of peg including metal tabs
F - Height of metal tabs at insert points to peg
G - Width of metal tabs
- - - -

At that point I should be able to 3D print a whole bunch when my 3D printers are back online, and also when I acquire the new filament I will be using, but the color alone will make it easy to identify (new ones will assuredly not be red, likely monochrome). I have a lead to really good filament for the application (M3D), but I need to figure out how much "give" the material has, which might be sufficient to install without any metal tabs at all if I design it correctly.

But aside from all that, I can at least model an exact replica and Thingiverse an STL file also (here's (https://www.thingiverse.com/DMCShep/designs) my current designs on there), so anyone with their own 3D printer can get one printed and test it. But I need to be blunt: probably 98% of the guys I've dealt with on the 3D printing community think it's normal for a 3D printer to not be fully dimensionally accurate, so just a fair warning that if it doesn't fit and someone else prints it, that doesn't inherently mean the design is bad, it could be as simple as configuration or capabilities of the printer too.

[Jonathan]

A couple threads about mirrors lately got me thinking about my own mirrors. My driver's side suffers from this looseness/missing orange ball-itis as well.

I got looking on the Houston page to see what the damage would be on a complete replacement for the driver's side mirror and found they are $205.08.

Here: http://store.delorean.com/p-7055-rear-view-mirror-rh.aspx

No comment on whether that price is a good one or not, because what got me perplexed is how it seems like they chose RH to be the driver's side mirror and the LH to be the passenger side. Am I seeing that correctly?

Just about everything else in the car you think of in terms of RH and LH sides when you are sitting in the driver's seat facing forward. Left front fender for example, RH taillights, LH parking brake cable, etc. But not the exterior mirrors. It's apparently backwards with those. Is that some sort of clever trick of how you need to sit facing forward and LOOK IN THE MIRROR and THEN they become the correct RH and LH sides?????? lol

Bump.

Still trying to determine which mirror assembly part number goes with which side. 110418 and 110419 are the numbers, but when you look at the photos for each of these, it sure does look like they got them backwards. I am considering buying a replacement for the driver's side of my car, but don't want to find out the hard way that I got the wrong side when it shows up at my front door.

[Rhye]

My 3D models of pegs attached (STEP203). One is a copy of original design, second one has an integrated spring. Enjoy.

557595576055761

--
Rhye

[Shep]

Bump.

Still trying to determine which mirror assembly part number goes with which side. 110418 and 110419 are the numbers, but when you look at the photos for each of these, it sure does look like they got them backwards. I am considering buying a replacement for the driver's side of my car, but don't want to find out the hard way that I got the wrong side when it shows up at my front door.Whaaaaaat. That's bonkers, surely they've sold a few of these over the years?! How has no one noticed yet? 110418.jpg shows 110419 and vice versa even.

I'd call Houston up and ask what's going on, that's one they need to fix on their end. I know DMCH James doesn't visit the forums frequently at least (he took a month or two to cross 559 off the fuel pump recall list via PM), but that's just weird.

Side note: I kinda wish these forums had the XDA-Developers feature where you could @Shep and I'd get a notification that somebody "mentioned" me. That would come in great handy for bringing someone's attention to a thread they didn't know was relevant to them (I just lucked upon this one).


My 3D models of pegs attached (STEP203). One is a copy of original design, second one has an integrated spring. Enjoy.Wow, that's actually really good! Damn, I was going to OpenSCAD the thing but that works just as well. (On my todo list: learning FreeCAD). Asking rather than assuming: are those free to use?

I still don't like that spring design in general, it's just prone to coming out if the pressure is suddenly removed (ask me how I know). But I can't think of a better way to do it. I've even thought about a way to incorporate "cross lock tweezers" (see pic below) but on that small of a scale, the springs snapping could arguably be worse. I'm just not sure yet, but would definitely prefer a 3D printed way to tackle that approach. That said, thanks to Thomas Sanladerer's latest YouTube upload (about making a phone mount for his car), I've learned of a new material that would be a perfect fit for automotive use: PC-ABS. This is what I'll be testing on my projects, personal and professional, and will hopefully become the dominating material in my stockpile.

55766

Fun fact: 3D printed ABS has pitfalls vs. its' injection-molded counterparts that mean the 3D printed stuff degrades in car environments. Dash cam mounts for example, while being great, might see some softening and changing of the print itself after a few years. Injection molded ABS however doesn't change in those same environments. Reason being: injection molded is 100% solid, while 3D printed stuff has gaps. Layer adhesion is a giant issue with ABS that requires enclosures and heat etc. to tackle, and those air gaps expand over time in 3D printed objects subjected to such heat. Reading the datasheet I found on PC-ABS, it seems to expand the temperature range beyond ABS enough that it will still hold up well in car environments. Whether or not that is fully accurate however remains to be seen, but given the hottest part this guy will encounter is a heatsunk mirror at best, I don't expect it to encounter many issues. Not like an interior part would anyhow. Our cars are literally built in insulating material by default (fiberglass) and are giant ovens when set out in direct sunlight for several hours.

[Rhye]

Asking rather than assuming: are those free to use?

Sure - free to use by anybody.



I still don't like that spring design in general, it's just prone to coming out if the pressure is suddenly removed (ask me how I know).


The spring is not a separate part. It just extends from the peg's main body - see cross section:

55769

Some experiments may be required to find the proper thickness of that "leaf spring" feature (it's around 0.9mm now). And I'd suggest to use some low-friction material (like nylon or something similar) - although I'm not an expert in plastics / 3D printing.

[Shep]

The spring is not a separate part. It just extends from the peg's main body - see cross section:

-snip-

Some experiments may be required to find the proper thickness of that "leaf spring" feature (it's around 0.9mm now). And I'd suggest to use some low-friction material (like nylon or something similar) - although I'm not an expert in plastics / 3D printing.OEM had two parts, sorry, should have phrased that more clearly. I replaced mine with a set from Tom N from Poland (deloreana.com) and one of the springs came out rather easily. Stopped progress for like two hours as I was on hands and knees finding it. Ideally, it would be embedded in the manufacturing process, or designed in a way where sudden tension changes wouldn't cause a release from the peg.

I could technically dual extruder it, man though that would get tricky. I've also heard horror stories of nylon combined with angelic praise of it, seems to be a 50-50 mix of love and hate for it. It's a material that I currently have not tried and don't know the properties of offhand, but do want to experiment with. I have flexibles that are in the "untested for now" category as well, however I am mostly saving those for grips and tires and such. One of my many projects down the road.

What my current curiosity is: a simple () shape, two arcs that meet at their endpoints to form a continuous loop. This would print rather well quite honestly, and if the cavity in the peg is shaped appropriately enough, there would be enough room for the shape to flatten and expand along the peg's length, while the material itself would resist this by nature. This might be a strange concept however as I do not know if nylon would handle the temperature range well without deforming, which would be absolutely critical in a tensioned print.

[Maritime-elf]

OEM had two parts, sorry, should have phrased that more clearly. I replaced mine with a set from Tom N from Poland (deloreana.com) and one of the springs came out rather easily. Stopped progress for like two hours as I was on hands and knees finding it. Ideally, it would be embedded in the manufacturing process, or designed in a way where sudden tension changes wouldn't cause a release from the peg.

I could technically dual extruder it, man though that would get tricky. I've also heard horror stories of nylon combined with angelic praise of it, seems to be a 50-50 mix of love and hate for it. It's a material that I currently have not tried and don't know the properties of offhand, but do want to experiment with. I have flexibles that are in the "untested for now" category as well, however I am mostly saving those for grips and tires and such. One of my many projects down the road.

What my current curiosity is: a simple () shape, two arcs that meet at their endpoints to form a continuous loop. This would print rather well quite honestly, and if the cavity in the peg is shaped appropriately enough, there would be enough room for the shape to flatten and expand along the peg's length, while the material itself would resist this by nature. This might be a strange concept however as I do not know if nylon would handle the temperature range well without deforming, which would be absolutely critical in a tensioned print.

Shep, this might sound odd, but only one of my pegs has the metal spring part. I am not sure they are required. or it could be that the factory just didn't care and stuck whatever into it. I hope your experimentation is going ok. If you still need a peg I can send you one of mine.

[Shep]

No need for a physical peg now that I have the actual CAD model to reference based off of said peg. I really only needed it to reverse engineer the part, which was done by Rhye.

Experimentation hasn't started yet, to be honest I had spent 3-4 days of setup, 1 day of filming, and 2-3 days of editing (learning curve mostly) to create a video not relevant to this thread (I'll post it soon), all while waiting for my order of color-changing silica gel to arrive. Just got it an hour ago, so now I can make that long-overdue filament dry box I've desperately needed to get higher-quality prints. Need to dry out my PLA first on this one.

I should also note that I want to try a single-extruder setup for this guy first. My printer does fantastic with one extruder, it has quite a few hiccups with two, so I don't want to tempt fate. This might prove difficult however, I have no idea how it will handle quite honestly, but that means it will be one material rather than two. My biggest concern is removal of the support structure. It needs to be clean enough to not cause problems, which might be easier said than done.

[Rhye]

Two sets of my pegs have just arrived. FDM printed red ABS. Two of a new design with plastic spring, two of original design. Original part (rightmost one) for comparison.

55861

I sanded slightly all contact surfaces, installed original springs and made some tests. Here are my conclusions:

1. Attaching points for the spring (little pits) are slightly tighter inside than in original part, obviously due to 3D printing accuracy limitations. As a result, spring has a bit less space to move freely, so the pressing force is higher. This results in increased sliding force. It shouldn't have however any negative impact on mirror pad behaviour (at least in my opinion) - actuators will handle this with no problem (checked). Good thing about it is that spring is less prone to falling away once pressed into the pits. But if one wants the spring to work exactly as intended originally, I'd recommend increasing the size of pits by ~0.1mm .

2. Pressing force of the all-plastic design peg's spring is way higher than original. Actuator can still handle this, however, unacceptable cracks appeared on the spring - see picture:

55860

The spring element would probably break and fall away very soon. I think that decreasing the height of the spring feature by around 0.3mm and increasing the cross section in most loaded areas would help here. If not, more elastic material should be considered.

3. After slightly sanding the peg's ball surface, it became a bit loose in pad's sockets (to my surprise: only in all-plastic pegs - I've checked the models and found no mistake). I'd recommend increasing the diameter of the ball slightly (by ~0.1-0.2mm) to compensate for surface finishing.

I'll probably finish my peg research here - I have to move to my other projects. Hope that my input was somewhat helpful. Shep, please continue with your ideas and find the perfect solution. (: If anybody is interested, I can offer one set of original design prototype pegs for further tests - I've equipped them with hand-made metal springs:

55862

The price would be just a cost of 3D printing and shipping to US (delivery time ~2 weeks) which makes 9$ for a set. But please be aware that they're just prototype parts - I can't guarantee they'll last as long as originals.

[Shep]

I'm actually quite surprised your result came out that good! My filament dry box just isn't cooperating with me, I cracked some plastic on the outer side and now I need to grab some more bins and drill a bunch of new holes again. Ugh... damn 60% humidity house...

Have you thought about printing them sideways, with the spring on the side? Looks like the break was layer separation, if the spring is on the X or Y axis rather than the Z axis, I would imagine the spring would still be quite strong. This would naturally need a little bit of support material, but that's probably 1% of the print job's plastic.

My thing is I don't have a mirror removed, so I have nothing to test it on without driving to DPI (hour one-way now) to test-fit, and he's not exactly returning my calls already (I pushed a few boundaries that I've regretted for the past two months...). Unless one of you guys is actually moderately local to Cleveland, OH?

[Rhye]

I'm actually quite surprised your result came out that good!

I'm also surprised by the high quality of the parts. Layer size was 0.09 mm. Not sure what printer they use - unless you can recognize from this photo:

https://8.allegroimg.com/original/01e154/5df908ae44d1bbb2b2f5bc3d6848



Have you thought about printing them sideways, with the spring on the side? Looks like the break was layer separation, if the spring is on the X or Y axis rather than the Z axis, I would imagine the spring would still be quite strong. This would naturally need a little bit of support material, but that's probably 1% of the print job's plastic.

Yes - you're 100% right here. This is because I've been thinking of a 3D printed part as of a solid while it is more like a stack of thin plastic layers fused together. (: It should definitely be lying on the long side when printing. And it would be perfect to apply layers exactly along the curvature of the spring shape (not sure if it's possible to program the printer like this).

[Shep]

Zortrax M200?
http://www.unishape.gr/en/?page_id=16723

There's a Maker's Muse review on it somewhere, I can't be arsed to find it as there's way better printers out there now for both ability and price point. There's also currently a frenzy of attention about GPL violations for printers running Marlin variants and hoarding the code (which is patently illegal) that will cause an "abandon ship" effect to drive the market into one where formerly awesome printers are nosediving in price that are "bought but unused." (NOS technically?) and the sellers do not want to associate with the products.

One rogue Linux dev is all it takes to start an upheaval of open source license abuses that have been taking place for decades with no one caring until suddenly now I suppose...

Anyhow I'm always keeping my eye on the market for the "latest and greatest", so I am quite happy to offer buyer's insight or be able to spot things a newcomer to the hobby might not know about. I've already helped a few on here get started. I am always one PM / email away! :)

EDIT: Part rotation, every slicer I know of can handle this with incredible ease, or you can rotate the part before sending the STL, but it sounded like you worked with somebody on this? I would ask them to orient it correctly if you make more, they should be able to provide you a screenshot to confirm.

[Rhye]

There's also currently a frenzy of attention about GPL violations for printers running Marlin variants...


Had no idea they use GPL licensed software in commercial products - this sounds ridiculous.


Part rotation, every slicer I know of can handle this with incredible ease...

No problem at all to change orientation of the part before exporting to STL. I had something else on my mind - I was wondering if it's possible to print the layers like this...:

55904

...instead of this:

55905

The first way shown should further improve mechanical properties of the spring feature.

[Shep]

Had no idea they use GPL licensed software in commercial products - this sounds ridiculous.Why? It's actually incredibly common and I've seen it damn near everywhere. Open source is open source, it's when you make changes to the open source and refuse to feed that back into the pool that you run into license violations. Creality is currently taking the biggest hit, having aggressively marketed their products as superior in every way but refusing to abide by the very rules everyone else has to follow that led them to get there in the first place.

Open up the owner's manual to a car stereo sometime. You'll see about 20 things listed with a license to the GPL :) I've been a code monkey professionally for 6+ years, GPL is everywhere in the software world. Easy to see why when you have a robust solution that's been thoroughly tested to meet the highest standards and you can simply use that rather than build your own solution that interfaces with it. Creality heavily changed the fundamentals of the Marlin firmware in a way that added features that have huge implications, and their own aggressive marketing tactics is coming back to bite them in the ass. Creality might be based in China, but they are not immune from the GPL, and they are certainly not immune from the community's reaction to the news either.

Hell ANET could use a break by now after their A8 burned half a house down in the third A8 fire... Too bad you can't sue China.

EDIT:
Oh and by the way, I stick with BSD for my open source stuff. That license is as bare-bones open source as you can get. Summary: "if you use it, you can't sue me, k?" Personal and commercial use and remix and everything else is fair game. I'm an "ideas man", the backlog is so huge that by the time I would be able to learn all what I need to in order to pull off the ideas I have right now, I'll have 70 years of ideas that will go unhashed. I seriously need to start a YouTube channel at some point to start sharing these ideas, I have such a giant backlog it's nuts.


No problem at all to change orientation of the part before exporting to STL. I had something else on my mind - I was wondering if it's possible to print the layers like this...:

[pic]

...instead of this:

[pic]

The first way shown should further improve mechanical properties of the spring feature.If that's a top-down view (bird's eye), that's the default way it will print. I'm having trouble converting to STL at the moment, if you can attach an STL, I can fire up Slic3r and show you what I mean. There's this neat feature in Slic3r where you can see the tool path and it will more than happily explain what's going on in one screenshot :)

[Shep]

Figured it out, FreeCAD wasn't associated with STP for some reason, but exported STL just fine. Here's how Slic3r automatically interprets the slicing for the peg sideways. This is the last layer that prints with the spring section, and visually shows the toolpaths of the extruder as it moves along the model. Yellow lines are "shells" (outside lines), red is "infill" (inside lines), green is support structure for the rounded head. This is totally adjustable and this particular setting is one I would not use for the pegs myself, but it was a preset I had that did well at visualizing how it would print.

Hope this answers your question! :)

https://i.imgur.com/gjo6ShX.png

Also, an update on earlier comments:


Creality is currently taking the biggest hitAnd is now seen as a champion of the GPL for their response to it. They not only provided the full unedited source code as used on their machines, but sent one of their printers to the main guy behind Marlin firmware (!!!), the exact project whose GPL license they had violated. And icing on the cake: they are working to even further work with the 3D printing community to make things right. Nobody there speaks English and there is a language barrier at play currently but that is absolutely astonishing to see that kind of response.

There's a small (unsubstantiated currently) rumor that Creality built the printer and worked with a different company to make the software, and Creality was completely unaware that any legal issues were happening at all, but in any scenario it's been quite remarkable.

Anyhow, thank you 3D Printing Nerd for the update (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pODH6FR4nU8) on that one. The implications are even more massive now that the response was "here you go, crap, what else can we do?" vs. stonewalling or "just" an apology (not that an apology isn't enough -- this is way more though).

I am still curious on who these "other offenders" have been, but if I'm right, none of them even matter with the way Creality has been innovating. Hopefully this is the beginning of a partnership!

[Rhye]

Hope this answers your question! :)

That's perfect - no more questions. (:


They not only provided the full unedited source code as used on their machines...

So an (almost) open source 3D printer (: - this sound's much better.

[Shep]

Glad the visual helped :) The two gaps at each end of the spring are the part that makes me say I would not use that preset generally speaking. Ideally it fills in that area, and one of my presets did quite well, but it was a smaller width and was harder to see. I think the preset here is 0.2 mm width while the 0.1 mm did quite well. I might even say 0.15 mm could be better, I haven't set that preset up yet but probably should for future prints.

Creality still has several closed-source parts but they are hardware. Open source 3D printing isn't always the best 3D printing from what I've found, frankly it seems to only work for Prusa machines. V1 Engineering I am interested in now too with their work on an electrical conduit-based CNC machine that looks fantastic and supposedly can handle aluminum (I intend to build one and we will see).

My ReliaBuild 3D isn't open source hardware, but it is extremely robust and sturdy and I have had nothing but amazing success with it and support extending years after warranty died off. M3D takes a very similar approach, I am backing their ProMega and might grab a Crane too, but this turn of events has me even closer to buying a Creality machine. I am looking for a quad machine at the moment and there are a few options, but upgrading my Prusa might be the best bet.

[Maritime-elf]

I just installed the peg Marcin sent me and they work perfect. I am trying to upload a video of the mirror moving but it won't let me.


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