April 14, 2022
Description
# Flexible Cable Relief for V-Core 3
This a pair of cable relief models made to be attached to the original rigid cable guides on both the hotend side and the backplane side of V-Core 3 3D printers. It is made to be printed in TPU and attached with zip ties only.
## How it's made
The lower part made of 3 close ribs in each of the models is made to imbricate with 2 or 3 of the rigid original V-Core cable mount ribs, and be maintained there with zip ties. For slight extra strength I used 2 zip ties per imbrication.
The higher part composed of 6 spaced ribs is made to orient the cable in a flexible way, with decreasing strength (because of a decreasing section between the ribs).
They only rely on zip ties for attachment and are made for an actual total diameter of cables of minimum 5mm (I suppose it would not be constrained properly otherwise and would need padding).
## Why
I wasn't satisfied with just attaching cables to the rigid guides. In my cases the cables were falling to the side over time, risking to catch some stuff, like the spool holder, and they were too thin to be well held and not rotate with zip ties without additional padding.
The other solutions I saw up until now generally involve additional hardware (e.g. piano wire or routing everything through a cable chain), and I wasn't really a fan of that, so wanted to try this other solution.
## Printing
### General recommendations
- TPU
- Spine oriented on the bed
- With enough diameters to make it solid for the higher area at least
- In case of problems with retraction, some tips
- Try adding an "extruder purging" cube next to the model to try to eliminate accumulation of bends on the same section of filament
- If no tuning of temperature and retraction works, eliminate retraction completely and then burn up the oozing with a lighter
### What worked
- LGX extruder
- Ultra slow 4mm3/s max flow
- 245 dC hotend, 60dC bed (probably not necessary)
- Eryone 95A TPU
- 5 / 6 diameters
- 0.4mm Nozzle
- no infill
- <1mm retraction
- Added a no-infill cube of (20mm x 20mm x max height) next to the model
- Printed one at a time.
## Known limitations
Not tested with ABS/ASA compatible temperatures that much yet (just a few hours), otherwise working as expected :)
Creeping is not necessarily something to try to avoid completely, as long as the cable remains both held solidly and out of the way of other elements in the printer.
License:
Creative Commons — Attribution — Share Alike
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