Golfball feet

New 3D Printer and designing noise reducing feet

I have been wanting a new 3D printer for a couple of years now. My first delve into the world of 3d modeling and design was when I purchased the cheapest piece of junk printer on the market, the ANET A8. Straight from the hands of the Chinese. The initial warnings I read about the ANET said that the printer had a tendency to catch fire. So, what seemed like $10,000 in upgrades later and countless hours, I had it printing pretty dang good. The problem was, it was LOUD! So, time to upgrade to a new (cheap) printer.

After a fair bit of research, I decided on the Tevo Tarantula Pro. It had a larger build plate and the frame is constructed from extruded aluminum (I always say it AL-YOU-MIN-U- IUM like our friends across the pond). It also has rollers instead of linear bearings. Of course I did some upgrades as I was building it, duh!

It came completely disassembled which is exactly the way I like it. I planned on upgrading the motor drivers to the TMC2208 trinamic servo drivers for a couple reasons. One, they are super quiet and two the stock drivers only support 16 microsteps where the TMC2208’s support 256 microsteps. No brainer. I added a BLTouch inductive bed leveler which I have on my POS printer. Lastly, I added a MOSFET for the heated bed so that there is less chance of it catching on fire.

After getting everything assembled, I noticed that the feet that came with it were hard plastic. Being someone who is well a-tune to sonic harshness, I thought there had to be another way. I started thinking about how I could isolate the printer from the table it’s will be sitting on. Generally, the tables act as an amplifier for any vibrations coming from the printer. I came to the conclusion that a harder foam would probably be best to dampen the vibrations. First I looked for a deal on stress balls. People must be really stressed out because those things are pricy. What I ended up with were foam practice golf balls. for about $0.25 a piece.

On to Fusion 360 to design some stuff up. This is what I came up with… Note that I printed a couple versions to test and this was my 3rd version.

After installing the feet, the printer is darn near silent (except for the fans) I am pretty pleased with these feet and I will put them on the POS printer soon. I will link to my Thingiverse post if you would like the files to print some for yourself. They can be adapted to almost anything.

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4676290

Here are some more pics of the feet installed.