Flying half-way around the world with a 3d printer

I recently went on a month-long trip to visit family for the holidays. Given that duration and my current obsession with 3d printing, I wanted to take a printer with me! I thought the experience was fun, and worth sharing. I ran into quite a lot of trouble along the way, learned a lot, but ultimately I consider the attempt successful, and here is the lil guy after getting back home:

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Those of you familiar with it, might notice it’s a Tronxy X1, with some less than common mods. I impulse-bought the thing a few months back and it turned out to be the perfect printer for me to attempt to bring along, given the printer is /tiiiiny/ and light.

I’m going to group this write-up by themes, rather than chronologically sort events for the sake of brevity, and coherency. I’m not big on taking photos, so consider most of the ones included here as dramatic-reenactments.

I hope this post can be helpful to someone who wants to do something similar, and I’m very much interested in hearing suggestions for improvements (=

The Frame

I like to travel light, so the goal here was to get a printer into my one carry-on, with room for clothes, and whatever else I “needed” with me. I also didn’t want to take the thing aaaalll the way apart. The tronxy x1 was easy enough to make fit. The X gantry can be pulled off over the top after you remove the handle. With that gantry lined up with the Z axis and the print bed removed, it comfortably fit into a standard carry-on suitcase. I also detached the Z axis threaded rod from the coupler, and tossed it into the middle of the 20x40 extrusion to hopefully prevent it from bending.

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Unfortunately I wound up having to check this bag in during one leg of the trip, and found that the printer sustained some damage on the way:

The Control Box

My biggest issue with getting it packed was the control box, attached to the printer with an awkwardly short cable. I wanted to be able to tetris it into the bag separately, so … I cut it off! I’m no electricity scientist, and couldn’t think of a better way to do this in a rush, so I made a “connector” by:

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I didn’t know if it was necessary, but I used two pins for each of the hotend wires.

The only issue I encountered with this setup, was the connectors ever so slightly pushed themselves apart sometimes, and occasionally I had to make sure they were in all the way.

The Power

Lastly, I wanted to avoid having to bring the big AC adapter. Again, not an electricity scientist, but it said the output power out of it is 5A at 12V. Which makes 60W. I had a usb-pd AC adapter that said 65W on it. I’m not a numbers scientist either but I figured the latter number was bigger and PD allows requesting a particular voltage, so it should work? I got a 12V DC USB-C PD power trigger board thing, soldered some red and black wires onto it and stuck them into the power connector on the motherboard and it worked mostly!

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I printed a benchy with my janky connector and usb-c power adapter plugged. That said, it didn’t work on the first try, I had the printer restart kind of randomly, so I wasn’t fully confident in the adapter being able to consistently provide enough power and wound up bringing the original adapter with me anyway since we were getting close to traveling.

Almost immediately, I was really happy that I explored this usb-pd option, because the default power adapter overheated and broke, tripping a fuse in the process. Oops. I got a replacement for it at a local shop, and it succumbed to the same fate. This is apparently a common problem.

That said, now that I was stuck powering the printer with the usb adapter, I started to understand the printer restarts. They were were caused by the printer momentarily drawing too much power due to circumstances like steppers starting to move after nozzle heating completing, or the fan starting up after a certain layer. Things that helped were:

Weirdly … only one of my three 65W adapters got me consistency in power. As mentioned above, I’m no electricity scientist so I’m not 100% sure what’s going there. Weirdly again, even a macbook pro charger did not give me consistent power. Unfortunately the working one is no longer available on amazon, so I’ll have to do some more testing there.

The Clog

Probably the biggest issue I encountered was when I kept the heatbreak fan off entirely, as I was figuring out how to keep the printer from restarting. This eventually caused some heat creep, and a clog. To clear it I disconnected the bowden tube to pull out the stuck filament, but in doing so I damaged the coupler that connected it to the extruder: specifically I broke the little plastic bit that holds the little metal teeth down. This led the bowden tube constantly getting pushed out during printing, me having to hold it in by hand as I tried to print some sort of plastic replacement for the coupler (unsuccessfully), chewing up the tube with the remaining teeth, and eventually both the coupler and bowden tube failing to a point of being unusable.

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Without access to amazon prime this wound up costing me a week of being able able to make prints, or make any progress towards tuning.

The Hunt

On that note, I found I was entirely underprepared for doing repairs on this thing (since I didn’t expect any). In my brain I figured less spare parts and tools = less border control problems. All I brought with me was the printer, a TUSH, and just the two allen keys I needed to put the thing back together. In reality border control didn’t really care about allen keys, spare bowden tubes, or couplers on the way back (they did take away a pair of flush cutters though). Not having access to those things at my destination, at first, meant I had had to make a really good friend of a local electronics shop owner, from whom I had to purchase allen keys, precision screw drivers, a soldering iron, wrench, the spare ac adaptor and utility knife. Unfortunately there was nothing he could do about the bowden tube and coupler, which is where I had to wait to get them from the internet.

The Outcome

Of the four-ish weeks that I stayed with family, I wound up with 2 weeks of tinkering with power supply and belt issues, 1 week waiting for the bowden tube stuff to come from the internet, and 1 week of pretty much 24/7 printing. I wasn’t going for perfect prints here, I just wanted stuff good enough to be interesting for the family. Little gifts like vases, earrings, and toys for kids came out great and people were happy, so I consider the attempt a success over all.

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Here’s what the setup looked like in it’s final form:

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printing probably the most complicated successful print, the articulated octopus.

The Future

It’s no positron, but I would totally travel with this thing again, and have some lessons for next time/tips for anyone interested in trying themselves:

Personally, my next steps/problems to solve with this thing are:

That said, I’d love to hear some suggestions for improvements (and of course, and happy to answer any questions).

bonus: this is the sound track of my life