I think I’m one of the first lucky people with the new Felix 1,5 printer with the nice linear ball bearings on the X and Y axis.

Never owned a 3D printer before or touched a 3D printed part, I was quite surprised with the quality of the 3D plastic parts. Not just the precision of the printed objects, but also the strength of it. I was always under impression that the laminated printed layers where quite brittle, and if je press real firmly it would all crumble.
I’ve made this review for the new guys like me, with the problems I’ve encountered and how I solved them.
First of all, Kudo’s to Guillaume, the precision of the design is extreme tight. For example, If you put all the parts on the Z axis, there’s no room left. Not a single millimeter play.
Well now time some pictures of the newly build Felix 1.5 printer since I haven’t seen them on this site. Note: I’ve made the fillament holder myself, and is not part of the 1.5 kit (you may download it for free below). Also I tossed the spiral wrap, I personally think the braided sleeving is a much neater solution for the cables.

All the parts


Assembled Felix 1.5

The new linear Y axis bearing

Below Heated Bed

The new extruder part design

The new aluminum connection

X axis motor mounting

X axis linear bearing

X axis cable



Z axis carrier part


New electronics housing. Notice the reset button hole position


Cable inlet

Felix with the cool light bar and tweezer bracket upgrade, you can download this over here:
Cool light LED bar upgrade
Tweezer Bracket
Problems Solutions and upgrades:
Alltough I’m very happy with the printer and the design, I have had some problems with it. So here is the list with troubles and the solutions I’ve implemented it to help others with maybe the same problems.
X motor mount clearance:

While manually moving the axes by hand to check the binding, I’ve discovered a problem with the Y-axis motor shaft hitting the X motor. Turns out that they accidentally sent me the wrong X-motor mount. After printing the right part (I fixed this problem temporally by clamping the X motor to the aluminum Z-beam). I Still had not enough clearance.
I needed to file about 1 mm of the X motor mount to fix this.

Just enough clearance after the fix
Heated bed was not exactly 90 degrees with the Z axis:

A problem I’ve encountered was that the heated bed was not exactly 90 degrees with the Z axis. This will result in slightly skewed parts.

So I’ve aligned the Y linear bearing by putting 3 sheets of paper between the bearing and the mount on one side.

I Also needed an extra washer under the belt bearing otherwise the belt grinded the upper big washer.
profile settings Skeinforge:
I’ve had some problems with the user profile settings in Skeinforge… Turns out the profile directory is ignored in windows 7 / 8. And all profiles are here: “C:\Users\[USERNAME]\.skeinforge\profiles”, so you have to copy the supplied profiles to this directory. Just create a new profile in Skeinforge, and search for it in explorer, to find the exact location. Also Repeties-Host needs to start as Administrator, otherwise Skeinforge can’t write to the programfiles directory.
Before I Figured this out, I used slic3r. This is a much user friendly slicer, but as it turns out, Skeinforge does a better job in slicing. So I encourage you to try to get Skeinforge running. It must be one of the worst user interfaces ever, but it does a good job calculating the slices.
Overheating stepper motor:
Another problem I’ve encountered was overheating stepper motor controllers. Which resulted in stopping and jittering stepper motors. After done some googling I’ve found out that you have to adjust the stepper motor controller with the small potentiometer on it.

First turn it all the way counter clockwise and then adjust it clockwise until the motors move without problems on the highest speed.
Reversed X axis tension-pull part:

Not a problem, but an easy improvement: I’ve reversed the X-axis tension-pull part. Seems much stronger this way to me then the picture in the manual (this way there’s more plastic behind the pulling forces.
Heated bed aluminum bar and linear bearing not on the same level:

Put an extra crinkled washer and big washer on both adjustment screws on the Y axis linear bearing.

The middle part is not on the same level as the linear bearing part, so this way you can compensate this. Otherwise you have to screw the middle part really tight.
Warped corners:

The Kapton-tape did a worse job keeping my printed parts on the bed. And the parts got warped at the corners. After several test I’ve found the best solution. A sanded glass plate. I’ve cut a 2mm thick glass picture-frame plate to the heated-bed size and sanded it firmly with wet waterproof sandpaper.

This holds the part extremely well, I can’t get the part of the bed while heated. But after the heated bed cools down to a temperature of 40 degrees, the part gets loose of the plate. I think the plastic parts gets a good grip between the scratches, and if the glass cools down, the glass plate shrinks and breaks the connection between the scratches. Also a nice extra is the flat finish on the bottom part, without the stripes of the “in between layer” of Kapton.
Fillament leaking hot-head:

Another problem I’ve encountered was fillament leaking from the extruder (between the hot-end and the heat separator). Guillaume thought that the hot-heat wasn’t screwed tight enough into the heat-separator. But I’d such a hard time screwing the two parts from each other (using two Tongue-and-groove pliers) that I don’t think that’s the problem. If you want to separate these two parts, make sure you heat it to 200 degrees.
I’ve fixed this by winding some Teflon tape on the thread (The same stuff plumbers use), And screwing the part back together tightly.
Loose Hot end:
After printing several items, the Hot-end became lose in his casing clamp.

I’ve fixed this by crinkling up some Kapton tape and clamping this between the hot-end and the new clamp.
Overheating Heated bed mosfet:
The mosfet heating the heated-bed became very very hot. If I touched it with a wet finger is made a sizzing noise dissipating al the moisture. I’ve fixed this by screwing a large piece of metal on it acting as a cooling block.

Make sure the metal of the other mosfets does not touch each other. If so, you enable the fans or the extruder.
Loose heat sinks:
I haven’t found a solution yet, but gluing heat sinks on the stepper motor’s isn’t really a good solution for me. A slight bump or touch can bump off the heat sinks. I need to make some kind of clamp or something. Maybe glue it in place with silicone?
Fillament holder:

I had some problems with the fillament string strangling while the fillament roll was laying on the ground. It also melted (well, not really melting, but it became soft and bended) if it touched the heated bed. So one of the first thing I’ve made with the printer was a fillament holder. It’s a simple design, but doing a great job. I wanted the holder above the printer to save desk space.

The long length of the aluminum bars is not the prettiest solution, but I’ve done this to give the moving printer head al lot movement-room without snatching too hard on the fillament roll.

I used 3 aluminum tubes with a diameter of 2,5CM. No bearings on purpose, otherwise a lot of roll could wind down if the printer head moves fast and snatched a part of fillament.


Some prints I’ve designed and printed:

So, what if your toddler loves the bumper cars… but there isn’t a bumper car Duplo toy (big Lego). You design one yourself!

Or this hexagon rail crossing

So, this is it for now, If you have ideas to improve some of my fixes please let me know!