Ender 5 bed supports (The Original "Super Struts")

thingiverse

Update: 3/15/20 - (PLA) Material Warning! Due to a number of reports from users who have printed their struts out of PLA having issues with cracking.. I dug in and did a bunch of testing, using various brands and colors of PLA. After MANY hours of testing (due to only having 1 working printer right now), I was able to conclude that YES, the strength and durability of this design will vary greatly from one PLA brand (and color) to another, and many of the sample prints that I made out of PLA during my test were, in my opinion, not strong enough for this design! Initially, I had intended on publishing the results of each PLA I tested, but after a lot of deliberation I decided that it wouldn't be fair to the PLA manufacturers to post data that shows MY results, printing this one particular design.. when your results could vary greatly. Also, there are a lot of new people who are just begining this hobby who buy a new Ender 5 and come here to print their first upgrades, and I don't want to scare them away from particular brands of PLA, just because my data show that it performed poorly for me, when printing this one design! My results DID conflict with reported results from users for several brands/colors of PLA, leading me to the conclusion that there are just TOO many variables to be able to fault or favor particular brands of PLA for use with this design. So.. In order to prevent users (especially new users) from spending hours printing this design out of PLA, only to have them crack the moment they go to install them. My recommendation is to NOT print this thing from PLA at all. Or, at least if you DO print them using PLA, do so at your own peril! Please don't comment about them cracking, if you chose to use PLA and they cracked upon installation! It's also worth mentioning that a huge number of users here HAVE printed them successfully out of PLA and have not experienced any cracking, and have been using them for quite some time without issue! So if all you have is PLA and you're excited, and want to try for yourself (I know the feeling, I've been there!) then by all means, go for it! You MAY have no problem! Otherwise, if you want this thing to come out and work as it was designed, then I highly.recommend you print them from PETG! They were SPECIFICALLY designed with the strength and flexibility of PETG in mind, so you will get the best results when using PETG to print this thing. To illustrate how MUCH of a difference there is between PLA and PETG on this design, when printing out of PLA, I had to be cautious when pressing the ends onto the aluminum sub bed, because, if that particular PLA resulted in the gap being too narrow, and it felt like I had to use too much pressure to push it onto the aluminum, then it was almost certain to crack unless I went in with a Dremel and ground away some material first! In contrast, the struts I printed out of PETG can be manually twisted by hand, and I can rotate the tip of the strut approximately 15-20 degrees in either direction, and the strut was fine, and showed no signs of splitting/cracking at all! And likewise, when installing PETG printed struts, I was able to tighten the bolts to the point where i had to manually hold the nuts to keep them from spinning and they would actually start to embed themselves into the part before the strut itself would fail or crack, and with the PLA version i had to use washers to distribute the pressure of the nut, and I could only "snug" them up onto the lead screw but housing for fear they were about to crack. So, use PETG if you want the BEST results, and want them to perform AS intended based on the design! Printing them with PLA IS possible, but due to the characteristics of PLA, they will be much more brittle than they were designed to be. There is a chance they may fail if mishandled during installation.. ESPECIALLY if you haven't NAILED your print settings, and you aren't 100% sure you're getting damn-near perfect layer adhesion. Some things may help, like setting your infill overlap slightly higher to ensure your infill layers are actually overlapped and getting "woven" into your inside perimeter. Don't use too much cooling, this can tend to set the plastic too quickly, before it's had a chance to properly "melt" into the layer beneath, and can result in very brittle prints that "delaminate" when stressed against the direction that the layers are running. I had mixed results with PLA, but I had 100% success with PETG. So use PLA at your discretion. Thanks!