October 29, 2025
Description
Warning: photo equipment repair common sense required! Disassemble stuff at your own risk! There are springs and miniscule screws that hate humanity are very easy to lose. You need photos or photographic memory to put it back, so take photos after each step if you are new to it!
Warning 2: FDM printers aren't supposed to print 0.04mm layers. Your milage may vary, and your printer bed might be scratched! Print at your own risk!
Shutter blades are made from 0.05mm spring steel. If you have access to laser, your best bet would be to cut this from 0.05-0.1mm steel with said laser. Printed leaf will be slightly inferior.
Original blade has second layer riveted close to pivot points. Rivets are not needed for 3d printed part so i didn't replicate them, but the part is made slightly thicker there.
You may remove levers to simplify disassembly (blue circles). Mind that aperture lever thingie is adjustable, but you can easily recalibrate it later. Three screws in red circles are required to remove aperture setting ring. Mind the spring sheet that does click/declick for the ring (red arrow).
Next remove those four screws. They are different, so take a note which goes where. The longest one also retains the release pin in the cylinder (red arrow). You better remove the pin to prevent dropping it later, mind it's orientation though. Once screws are removed you can take the whole aperture assembly out and work with the shutter blades.
(no photos sorry)
They are pretty self-explainable. Mind that once you've removed the cover, they are free and eager to fall out, be careful. The disk that they sit on is spring loaded and also free. If it clips of its position, gently put it back (there are a few springed things you'll have to move out of the way). Now you can remove the blades, print replacements and reassemble it.
I set layer height on my K1C to 0.04 ignoring the warnings that minimal height is 0.08. I also have smooth PEI bed.
Printing itself wasn't that of an issue, even single layer 0.05mm blade prints well. Problem is to print an opaque light-tight blade. I ended up with 0.12mm three-layered blade (+1 layer for the hinge), which is almost perfect by itself, but then i covered it with a black marker.
Plastic: black PETG
Layer height, first layer height: 0.04mm
Ironing: all
Flow: increased from normal 0.95 to 1
Speeds: lowered to 60-80
Top-bottom solid infill overlap: slightly increased
You can experiment with top and bottom surface patterns (concentric, hilbert curve). The general idea is that you better overextrude then underextrude for those blades to be opaque.
License:
Creative Commons — Attribution — Noncommercial — Share Alike