Post
by Tim » Fri Dec 11, 2015 2:34 am
I'm sure there are numerous factors and trade-offs. As the frame gets longer, it allows more bending in the middle, so you can end up with a warp along the X-axis. As the Y-axis rail gets longer, it adds more weight to the Z-stage, which puts more strain on the Z-stepper; also that part is cantilevered, so as you increase the weight of both the Z-stage and a larger bed, you put more torque on the Z-rails. But that's a weak argument, because people have been using Mic-6 tooling plate as a bed, which is way heavier than the borosilicate glass plate, so obviously the M2 can take a lot more weight pretty much effortlessly.
The rails themselves are already close to 10 x 12. And you can gain a wider print area (for the v4 extruder) by the simple trick of flipping over the mount plate (and printing the drive housing and the motor mount reversed right-to-left---this is what I did on my twin extruder experiment to get extra space on the X axis). Now if you can remove the corner brackets from the big spider bracket holding the heated bed, you should be able to fit at least a 9 x 11, and possibly a half-inch more in each direction, plate on top of that. The heater isn't going to reach the edges very well, but if that doesn't bother you, it should get you increased bed area with little effort.
But that's all off the top of my head, except for flipping the extruder around, which I've actually done. There may be more limitations that I haven't thought of.
as all we need is probably 10x8 but is hard to print 10x8 on a plate 10x8 if you know what i mean
