Converting Taz 6 to Workhorse

I was wondering if any has ever thought about converting their Taz 6 to a Workhorse or even beyond that upgrade the screen and board and bed leveling system lol. I started with 3d printers in 2017 with a Tevo Tarantula and that thing was a pain to put together and at the end it was no longer a Tarantula. since then I bought a ender 3, Creality resin, and now the Taz 6, I have always been a fan of 3d printers since i started learing about them way before i got my first one. I also have in order the The Original Prusal XL, and the Hitry Rocket 1 resin. Getting back to what i would like to do. i want to start by converting my Taz 6 into a Workhorse, would it be as simple as printing all the upgraded parts and swapping them, and also replacing the one y shaft for the two. eventually I want to upgrade the old one color screen and put something more up-to-date. with a 32bit board maybe the Duet. your comments are greatly appreciated

You can visit ohai.lulzbot.com to get assembly instructions for the printers.

There is even more detail at devel.lulzbot.com … but that gets a bit tricky because products are referenced by internal product codenames rather than the product name used for consumers.

Printers get codenames based on types of trees. The TAZ Workhorse is ā€˜redgum’. Much of what you might want to know about a TAZ Workhorse would be here: Index of /TAZ/redgum

I do want to caution you on the RAMBo board. The TAZ Workhorse uses a modified version of the RAMBo 1.4 (and you can buy one through the LulzBot parts website). I think a TAZ 6 early build would have a RAMBo 1.3 (I think that’s right) but it can use a RAMBo 1.4 (and that’s what LulzBot sells as the replacement board.)

And while you can get a RAMBo from other sources, LulzBot hardware patches the board by soldering in a couple of capacitors. They do document the process. Just be aware that if you choose to source the board from someone other than LulzBot, you’ll need to solder in the capacitors following their instructions.

The Workhorse doesn’t use Z-axis lead screws… it uses a belt-driven Z axis. The bill-of-materials (BOM) would list what motors and belts are used, etc. The site does have all the parts fully documented.

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Keep us posted if you go down this road. I would seriously consider following your lead.

Hi

a very interessting topic, have looked at the same possibilities.

I have an TAZ 6 that is converted to Archim 2 now and would the mechanical upgrade to the Workhorse parts make it like a TAZ Pro without the fancy toolhead and color display?

Sebastian
Norway

Following along. Have a TAZ6 converted to an archim2 with a BLtouch. Just ordered parts to convert the X&Y to openbuild rails. Would love to get rid of the lead screws.

I’m looking at the files here, as I suspect they may represent a newer version (ā€œ1.0.2ā€) and some of the files have newer timestamps.

https://download.lulzbot.com/TAZ/TAZ_WE/v1.0.2/

Lulzbot used to sell most of the non-printable parts as one-offs for people who wanted to build their own, which is how I built my TAZ 5 clone (ā€œTurtlebotā€) and then upgraded him to a TAZ 6 design (minus the unnecessary physical control box change).

However, it seems that tradition isn’t presently continuing? I don’t see any of the non-printable parts (ā€œVitaminsā€ in RepRap parlance) of the newer generation machines for sale on their site.

In particular, I want to source these metal parts to convert to the belt-driven z-axis:

Anyone know where these might be obtainable?

I’m going to retrofit my printer with linear rails for the X and Y axes, so I’ll have to create modified versions of the X ends to replace the smooth rods with attachment points for 2020 extrusions, to which I’ll be mounting the linear rails. I’d rather not have to also design and print more chunky and heavily reinforced plastic replacements for the Z top plates and Z axis idlers. I presume they’re metal for a combination of aesthetic and functional reasons: they’d need to be quite a bit chunkier to handle the potential stresses if you made them out of plastic.

For the X and Y axes, I’m planning to do basically what IT-Works did with their X-Axis and Y-Axis linear rail modifications, as it appears they have chosen not to publish files for their modifications. (Unless I just haven’t looked in the right place?)

Whenever I get around to it, I’ll publish my parts on Thingiverse and/or Printables.

Unfortunately, the CAD software I learned was the now-defunct and always-buggy 123D Design. So I’ll either have to design the updated versions from scratch in that or learn a new CAD package.

Did you contact ITWorks directly? They pointed me to some of their other designs and I’m going to be doing business with them wherever feasible.