You made me do this… 

Those sand containers are a great solution. Did you try adding the sand only to the static portions of the frame?

I still feel like the sand in the frame might marginally helps, but adding the "sand containers" to all of the moving parts really just serves to add weight and increase the problems.

Try removing the sand blocks from the moving parts. Keep them on the non-moving parts.

In the machine tool world, "epoxy granite" is used to fill machine frames to increase rigidity and dampening ability. It's basically just epoxy resin and sand. What the epoxy adds is it connects the mass of the sand to the structure, making it one. The aluminum extrusion with sand in it will ring nearly as much as without the sand as the sand is able to just move and allow the aluminum to move (ring).

There's an amazing technique called "Motion Amplification" which uses special cameras and DSP to visually exaggerate imperceptible movements in video. It's used largely for identifying sources of resonance in structures and industrial machinery. I'd be fascinated to see it used on a 3D printer. I predict the main source of resonance is the belts.

The sand on a rapid-moving part was totally a mistake on my opinion. Getting down the rabit hole you could try with some mineral oil, like the ones that are inside car/bike suspensions...?

Not documenting "failures" is a huge problem in the medical industry b/c peeps don't want to embarrass themselves. Props to you for posting this. It helps inspire new hypotheses to come and still makes good content 👌

FYI: I put a FDM printer on a $20K active dampening vibration table we use for laser alignment and it made no difference. I think the issue is amplitude and frequency is not consistent. What about hanging the printer from a pivot point, with a mass dampener at the other end of the pivot point? A sort of Foucalt's pendulum with a mass dampener.

Tom, this is such a great video! No meaningful results are still results, just as you said. Only you would build a Suspensorium Love it! I'm chasing resonance reduction as well and would be interested in how different belts affect things. You are both thorough and entertaining and it is always a pleasure watching your videos.

Hmm, makes sense that you shouldn't put weight on the moving parts. So I'd try the same sand setup but excluding the print bed since it's moving quickly and weighting it gives more inertia so a higher probability of skips.

I’ve put my printer on a square of *memory foam* . Using tick square of plywood on top so the printer doesn’t just sink into the memory foam. It works great & definitely makes the printer quieter.

Lol, you seemed so tired & disappointed by the end of the video, but you make a good point that even the failures are useful information! This has taught me that if I want to deal with vibration, I'm better off putting my time into brushing up on my old engineering courses rather than on messy, half-baked quick-fixes. Thanks for that!

I would recommend removing the sand from the print bed. Then, run the tests again: With Feet, without feet, and then suspended. This series is great, and your willingness to be honest is appreciated.

Love your honesty one of the reasons why we come to you you always keep it honest so we all don't go out to the store and buy lumber and try to make what you made lol I can only imagine how many people be trying to pull out their hair cuz they couldn't get what you have thanks again for keeping it honest and real

tuned mass damper are also commonly used in skyscrapers to absorb vibrations from swaying in the wind. there's one in Taiwan where the architects famously decided to make it a tourist attraction - instead of tucking a concrete block away in some utility room they made the main damper a large shiny decorated sphere hanging in the middle of a big atrium.

Another great video Tom. This is just a collection of thoughts. Sand alone isn't great at dampening. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere. Solution Epoxy "Granit" (a with Epoxy damped mixture of sand that is filled and compresses in forms or extrusions to minimize resonances and vibrations on Professional Machines like Kern cnc mills) Weight alone helps a bit but Weight and a Dampener works great. I would love to see the printer mounted to the paver and than placed on a 2 to 5 inch think piece of upholstery foam. Oh and i think stifer belts will make a noticabal difrence (steel cored belts, heard that there are some out there in the wild) Keep up the great work and i cant wait to see the next episode in this series and the escalation that it could bring with it.

Or you could try Input Shaper, I sure hope that's where this is going, try a bunch of physical solutions, show they don't really work, then show the absolute magic of Input Shaper tuned with an ADXL.

Interesting ideas! It might work better to put the 3d printer on legs that stick into a bucket of sand, so that there is lots of sand to absorb vibrations in the base. I am curious to see the result of a test like that!

Yes definitely do a video on the belts please ...... Since I starting playing around with 3d printing and my velleman k8200 many years ago you have taught me so much, and are normally the go to videos when I have a problem or just want to improve something. Keep them coming and hope to see you around for many more years to come THANK YOU Tom

Wow! I really thank you soooo much for showing all this and still be so sympathetic! Cheers a lot!

Would absolutely love to see the belt comparisons Great video as always, always learning from your content. Keep it up

Thank you for going through everything that didn't work. I've been really curious about sand on smaller machines. I'd love to see a video on the different belts. If you could please have one cheaper belt case using an old piece belt that would be great. I honestly wonder about my belts every time I see ringing.

Need stiffness + weight everywhere in the frame to shift the frequencies higher. That being said most ringing is due to how stepper motors work. Throw an oscilloscope on the stepper motor, then run Input shaper and compare.

Thanks for the attempt Thomas! I know I appreciate all the effort you put in these videos!

I just bought some motor bike gel pads, cut them to roughly 5x5x2cm and put them under the printer. They have the advantage of being able to move in all directions and completely removed all ringing. The printers still stand on massive, 5cm thick sandstone slabs and those are on rubber mats, which results in an de-coupled, non resonating table and a still free moving printer While moving fast, you can see the gel visibly shaking and shifting the printer as it absorbs the energy, but the printer never moves on the gel itself. this might be worth a try if you have ringing and/or noise issues printer: prusa i3 mk3s

Back in the late 1980s, some of the scientific equipment vendors, such Edmund Scientific, sold rubber ball kits for physics demonstrations. One ball would be a standard rubber ball and would bounce as such. The other ball would sometimes be called a dead ball as it wouldn't bounce. The idea was to show how energy could transferred in one direction (bounce) or dispersed in multiple simultaneous directions (dead). At that time, the dead balls were of particular interest in the amateur holography scene as lasers weren't very powerful and the holographic process was extremely sensitive to vibrations. I don't know if the dead balls or material are still available but if still available, that could be an interesting test.

Keep this series going please. Super enternaining and gets everybody's gears going. What about non-symetric dampening setup? It could help with reducing resonation of the dampening system itself. For instance - your tesseract cube with some cables tensioned way more? Or usual dampening rubber feet but with one odd, softer/stiffer foot?

Any experiment that contributes to knowledge is always welcome. Whether the output is positive or negative, it is still knowkedge that can used in future endevours. Please continue with the belt swaps to see if there is any improvement to be gained on the prints at high speeds/accelerations. Thank you Tom.

Great ideas, Thomas. The super hero prison made me laugh out loud, very accurate description of how it looks lol

7:54 Hot glue is amazing. It allows for quick prototyping, you can undo it with a little isopropyl alcohol for a quick adjustment, and if it works it'll last for years. Heck, that 3D printer motherboard probably has hot glue (badly applied, no doubt) on it's motherboard connectors.

I appreciate your content and the help it's given me in my 3D printing journey. I'd love to see the difference the belts make.

Good job! Thanks for doing these experiments.

Awesome content as always, loving all of it 👌

Very cool video. Not vibration or resonance related, but one thing i have been curious about for a long time is how flipping the printer upside down would affect overhangs and bridges. Since any sagging will be pushed back up by the next pass of the nozzle, I would expect it to improve the results. And now you have the perfect "printer enclosure" to test it 😄 Also seeing the effect of different belts would be very interesting.

I have really enjoyed these videos. Short of software resonance compensation, there are a lot of things people try, and an honest look at some of them was nice to see. Great content as always. Thank you!

Very interested in the belt comparison video. I found early on in continuous belt platforms (CoreXY) that there are parametric resonances that crosstalk in abrupt vector changes, leading to ringing artifacts. I used accelerometers and a 35670a dynamic signal analyzer to capture the response of the gantry vs the head. Data is on e3d's forum. I came to believe, but did not follow up on the idea of tuned dashpots that the belts can ride on... (shock absorbing idler pulleys)... might be a trick to try. Thanks for the hard work, Tom!

How well does Printer->Concrete Tile->Dampening Material (Rubber, Foam, etc)->Concrete Tile work?

Great video, as usual. Would love to see a belt comparison video.

I got a Creality CR-6 SE and I haven’t ever gotten it to work, and I found out that both the extruder and the printing bed are completely different temperatures than what it says on the screen so I’ve been searching for videos to try to help me and I click on this video thinking I might find something, only to find you filling your 3-D printer with sand and hanging it upside down from bungee cords 😂 although your video didn’t help me with my printer, it did lift my spirit, so thank you.👍

Had a good time watching this, thanks. I found vibration dampening a bit annoying too, especially when you have a wide range of excitation. Nvmd, white steel belts on heavy beds vs cheap or kevlar would be interesting indeed.

I think you may get some interesting results if you modified the springs on the tesseract. What it is now is a vibration isolator not a damper. All of the vibrations made by the printer stay within the system. If you think about vibration dampers on cars there are two parts, the spring and the actual damper or shock absorber. The tesseract set up is only spring and does not have the best damping qualities.

Anakin hates this video so much

I have the Ender3 V2, so thank you for the effort. Interesting results!

On the UH60 BlackHawk Helicopter, we have tuned masses on springs that we test and tune to the aircraft to dampen unwanted vibrations, on the new model, there are counter rotating electromechanical vibration dampers that actively cancel unwanted frequencies.

You could try small dampers from RC trucks. They are sprung and oil filled. This will actually adjust the frequencies instead of just adjusting the amplitudes. You need to absorb some energy, elastic straps provide almost no damping effect. I dont understand the fascination with optimizing single variables. It would be far more effective to increase the stiffness of the frame by putting braces on it or adding gussets at the connection. Damping a wet noodle is pointless. Brace it until it is rigid the dampen it. Otherwise you are finding ways to dampen a frequency that is irrelevant and ineffective. At least the oil filled damper would effect a far wider spectrum of frequencies and it is tunable using different weight oils.

9:35 The look of mischievous glee in your face when you suggest dropping the ender 3 is something we need more off.. Like how much abuse can a printer take before it effects printing quality (destruction Derby for 3d printers / I'm sure we can make 'scientific' valid conclusions from this 'experimental' printer abuse)

You got lots of points! Sometimes involving plastics or other absorbent material. Thanks for making this video.

Just wanted to say thank you for all that you have done and continue to do to help the community improve our printers and skills. You and a couple other content creators out there are doing amazing things for the community that are just as important, if not more than what companies like Prusa do to continually advance all aspects of 3D printing. Again, I would like to convey a sincere whole hearted thank you!!!

Why did you add weight to the moving parts? Obviously that wouldn't work. The question was if sand in the *non*-moving parts would make a difference.

RU-vid in parts seems to be more honest than most the research journals - also presenting what did not work, or what did not make the greatest WOW !!! effect. thanks so much

You went through all that effort to add the sand to the moving bed, found out that the extra weight on the bed cause problems, and then didn’t test without bed weights on the Cartesian printer. Wowza.

Appreciate all the efforts you do. I would be very interested in the belt test - looking at making a scaled up printer and starting to consider "length of belt" and stretch.

I have observed quite a bit of NVH testing. The bottom rails likely didnt harm much, but the vertical supports having sand added was the main issue making prints worse. Adding mass to cantilevered components will just shift the frequency of the resonance. More mass generally = more resonance at lower frequencies (greater deflection distance). Adding reinforcement to the gantry along with soft mounts that absorb energy will help most. A support rod run from the top of each vertical support, to lower frame would mitigate the motion of the gantry. Soft materials used under the machine would help absorb vibrations from print head motion.

subscribed just because of your honesty about the results. GOOD VID

Should have used lead shot as is used in speaker pedestals - more mass and less leaky than sand. Ultimately the problem is with elasticity within the printer frame and mechanism. The lab robots I work on use large stiff belts that don't stretch to achieve precision. If I could be bothered to do it , I would reproduce the printer frame in welded steel RHS. That would eliminate a lot of the flex. Then the only thing to deal with is the flex in the mechanical drives. You could try wider belts. Most modern motorcycles have vibration dampers in the handlebar ends and often on other parts of the frame

Great fun! Lots of good ideas. I heard this video mentioned quite a bit at MRRF this past weekend.

This one of your best videos, thank you

I think the best solution would be to have a counter weight on the same belt as the X or Y. The top of the belt moves the opposite direction as the bottom of the belt.. Let's say you have a weight on the X that weighs the same as the head.. They would move opposite directions, and hence when they stop, should vibrate the machine. Just a thought.

Good educational video. I've ordered some vibration dampening feet for a washing machine, will see if this helps.

Those all seemed like good ideas. Thanks for letting us know they don't work! You saved a lot of people a lot of time!

What worked well for my Ender 3 Pro: Get a concrete paver (approx 18x18x1.5in), wash it, dry it, then spray it with FlexSeal to stop dust. Put the paver on 4 small pads of some of the soft dense foam you see in some shipping packages. Then put the printer on the paver. The printer will shake the "ground" (paver) and the mass of the paver acts as a damper and disipates through the foam pads. It makes the printer much more quiet too.

I would love to watch a thorough analysis of performing system identification and tuning a spring and damper to the resulting model. Bonus points if you can explore different geometries of the printed feet for different frequencies!

Thomas, you didn’t fail. You simply helped identify several options that don’t work and reduced the list of remaining options for others to test going forward. The effects from resonance appear to be most pronounced along the X and Y axes since we rarely move and change directions rapidly along the Z axis ( unless one starts slicing and printing diagonally at some point ). That said, I think effects from the X axis resonance might be reduced by two things 1) making the X-Z frame one solid piece (welding the corners, for example) and 2) dampening or stiffening the print head assembly itself. The Y axis requires something more robust to prevent additional forward movement when shifting direction due to the increased inertia involved. Perhaps some type of electromagnetic braking along the direction of the current force Y vector ( picture a magnet attached to the bed which whose strength of attraction to the base could be varied to match the force Y, but in the opposite direction of the force Y vector). Just sanding thoughts while drinking coffee….

Great content ! Love the pro video you do now

I love your Sciency thinking. Please keep valuing it as this sets you greatly apart from typical RU-vid content we all got used to! - You briefly mentioned the additional mass on the printbed might harm the print quality. I totally agree. I would have tried again withouout those printbed Santainers, maybe even adding them elsewhere… - I highly value the additional mass on the printer. The bigger the mass difference between bed and printer body, the more recoil you can convert into printbed acceleration. - A tip from back in the days (experience with laser interferometry in physics lab): For effective (nearly critical) dampening of alu extrusion profiles instead of pure frequency shifting fill the profiles with silicone (not silicon - Fugensilikon, nicht Silizium ;-) This also greatly assists survivability of your mechanical components when compared to sand… I would love to know the frequency range of problematic ringing. This would hugely narrow down the root of the evil (profile bending, profile ringing, belt stiffness etc.) okok, I’m getting to scientific. Looking forward to the engineering way of life: try it out! :-D

Great experiment. Thank you!

Excellent video! Thanks for being honest and detailing so much. Honestly I would just install klipper and use resonance compensation. Done. Huge improvement for my CR10.

Awesome video Thomas! I would love to see a follow up with with the different belts. Thanks for the entertainment, It's much appreciated.

I Love the creativity in these ideas. It would be interesting to see what measurements with klipper and an accelerometer you would get from the different modifications.

I am an electrical engineer so I haven't studied this topic, but I would first attach vibration sensors all over the frame and heating bed and do frequency analysis and then designed springs with resonant frequencies matching the strongest frequencies from the analysis.

I cut the molded foam and box my E3V3KE came in and placed it in that. No problems so far. Not sure even if it helps but it's peace of mind.

Großartiges Video! Wie immer hast Du sehr Mühe gegeben, dass machen nur wenige RU-vidr.

Just a piece of advice for measuring squares, you can do the triangle method. 3:4:5, is the ratio your sides should be at and the distance between them. Its a commonly used carpentry trick for getting perfect 90 degree angles.

Thomas great video like always. Thank you

Since the idea is to apply dampening to counter the moving parts, and you already have the suspension rig, try loading two printers one facing upright and the upside down one facing the opposite direction... you want to load the same program into both and start them running (the bottom one does not need to be actually printing). The bottom printer will be moving in the opposite direction to the top one and should mostly cancel out the movements of the top one. Might be a relatively easy experiment to try out.

Sand filled feet are a good, cheap and decently working solution. There are many different sand filled balls you can use with a printed holder to keep them in place below the printer

Cheers for experimenting so we don't have to. Curious if/how different dampening materials/fluids attached just to static frame components would help, or not. Detaching power supply and fan cooled controller board. Decouple spool. Basically isolate everything possible.

VERY COOL. Great video! This is the importance of science though, even if the results are not amazing. Keep it up, as I think eventually you will be finding something that does work quite well!

I'm glad you did this so we didn't have to do it😀 Other than couple of foam pads from printer box under the feet i gave up on everything else.

Yes, absolutely do the belt tests. When I build a precision laser plotter, I used steel strengthened belts, that was before I switched to ball screws, so much better

Thanks for sharing!

This was fantastic. And thank you so much for testing things out. I was very curious as to the outcome, especially the sand damped tests. It also makes sense that BMW used such a complicated series of dampers. But in the industrial and aerospace worlds, there is a simpler solution - avoid the areas of operation that induce harmful resonances! In a light aircraft, this could be as simple as a plaque that says "Do not run propeller at RPM between 2500 and 2550 for more than 5 minutes". Or for a larger aircraft, a redesign of the vibration causing components, to shift their resonances rather than compensate in other areas. Where the moving masses are controlled by stepper motors, that's the obvious place to control vibrations. Match the speeds and accelerations to avoid areas of resonance. That's not cheating or a hack! That's proper design. Love your channel and the work that you do...not intended as a slight at all. That I learned that a printer will work upside down is worth more than the price of admission. To me that means it's just a matter of time before there's a 3d printer in space.

These kind of videos are fun, great and entertaining Thomas. I think that branded belts could help, but just a bit

Great video Tom! I want to suspend my printer in a similar cube now just for looks! I have been running squash balls on my printers (like smaller less bouncy racket balls), they do a fairly good job of damping lower frequencies and I have seen a notable improvement on all of my printers (They're also notably quieter which is nice). Maybe again pure luck like your dampers but I would love to see the results characterized! I would also love to see the experiment with belts!

Thank you for making the portmanteau of "sandtainers." I will now add that to my vocabulary.

Thanks for sharing something that didn't work! Really important in times of rampant reporting bias.

I went through the trouble of getting Klipper working on my Ender 3 V2 for resonance tuning using an accelerometer (and Klipper's implementation of pressure advance works with the stepper drivers hardwired into legacy mode on a stock V2). It worked incredibly well and the Ender's frame and motion system is surprisingly stiff, allowing the use of the better dampening algorithms that provide compensation without excessive smoothing of corners.

Absolutely loved your scientific approach and honest results!

Love your content. And yes I would quite enjoy a belt comparison video. I feel over the years I put so much time, money and effort into my Ender 3 it would be financial irresponsible to stop now! I need the best belts! 😂

Sand was common for audiophiles for a short time to deaden platforms and it did work but then things like soundproofing sheets ended that. One thing I am testing is turntable spikes/isolators. They are little 2 part metal pucks that either have a spike that fits In a cup foot or use a steel ball between 2 metal plates. They work well and so far are stopping a lot of transfer from the printer to the table.

If you're chasing after resonances, tuning the structure will get you into diminishing returns fairly quickly. What you want to do is ramp all of your steppers up and down so that resonance never has time to build. Remember, one movement of the printer is easy to dampen out, it becomes a problem when you have many movements happening rhythmically that case resonance to build to the point where they cause significant movement. The other thing to do is to decrease the mass of your moving elements. The ender 3 is a poor platform to perform that modification on, however, something like a voron build gives ample opportunity to drill out 'speed holes' while maintaining rigidity.

It is all about the mass of the stationary parts. The more mass, the better. I went from a 1000lb vertical bench top milling machine to a Bridgeport-style vertical mill weighing around 3000 lbs, and the difference in the surface finish was astounding during cuts in steel. The same principle applies to a 3D printer. More mass in the stationary frame will help tremendously. Sand is not dense enough. The little sand containers aren't even close to having enough mass. Some solid steel bolted to the extrusions would be a possibility. Another option is to plug all of the holes in the extrusions and pour that big container of mercury you have sitting on the shelf into the machine ;)

Thomas Sanladerer do you want more ideas?) 1) Find a large box or create from the boards, the embankment of sand 10-15 centimeters there and put the printer on top. 2) Use four springs along the edges of the printer =) 3) What is the best damper? True, rubber! In the former USSR (Russia, Ukraine and others), when a rubber damper dries at the compressor in a soldering station and the compressor begins to make a lot of noise, some people buy ... a rubber water hose, cut cylindrical pieces of the desired length and attach under a compressor. Can try to cut off 4 pieces of a hose and attach around the perimeter of the printer? 4) Use foaming for sofas or chairs. It is of different stiffness. I think you need to take it harder.

I worked in the computer chip industry and this is what they do to print computer chips at 0.25 microns and less. XYZ stage is on granite slab. That slab is on air bladders and sits on another granite slabs. All cables are mounted with vibration dampening hardware. All motors are mounted with vibration damping hardware. To check for vibration we put accelerometer on each axis ( use one accelerometer 3 times). My touch was so tuned in after 16 years I could put my hand on the stage close my eyes and tell you where the vibration was coming from. Most 3D printers don’t isolate the motors or cables. I recommend silicon dampeners for the motors and cables and for 3D use a tile or concrete tile on silicone dampeners on top of another tile. Air bladder maybe overkill

FWIW, I put my Prusa i3 mk2 on a paving stone and under the paving stone I put a rectangular inflatable chair cushion (i.e. anti bedsore inflatable cushion for a wheel chair). Primarily I did this to reduce the sound, since the homemade wooden workbench I set my printer on was amplifying the vibrations of the printer. I can pretty much only hear the loud stock fans now.

One thing that I found to minimize vibration and stepper sounds is to add a bearing to the other side of the motor. I used a v slot wheel that just happened to fit my set up.

Tom, dumb question as I haven't checked through all of your other experiments, yet - what have you done with the bed springs? Stock Ender 3 springs are woeful, I use the regular yellow upgrade springs on all of my printers, with a LOT of compression to eliminate some print bed wobble, these springs are better finished than ones fitted to cars - the ends are ground flat - [N.B. car springs break BECAUSE the ends are not finished properly so it transfers all the stress to the end of the first coil, saves the maker money, costs us for replacements] The other thing I do is fix the M4 countersunk [flat head] screws to the print surface from below, using M4 nylon nuts - this fixes the screws to the print bed, don't use metal nuts without nylon washers - you will damage the insulation surface or worse, short the bed to the frame, not unlike what happened with the early CR6SE's. Finally, after fixing the screws to the bed, putting the bed back onto the frame becomes difficult because the clearances on the screws are tight, so I enlarge three of the four holes with a 5mm drill.

Increasing the static mass is fine but adding weight on the moving parts is silly. Anything that moves you want as light as possible. I don't see much point in trying to dampen the Z axis either. Most of the resonance is coming from Y and X. Adding more springs to the system is just going to shift the frequency not absorb the inertia. It seems like pure dampening is a better approach. How about a two piece foot setup with a shallow angled concave dish stacked with a matching convex disc and a little bit of grease in between. So when the foot tries to move off center it has to go 'uphill' and the grease will convert some inertia to friction (heat). Something like a miniature plastic version of the earthquake bearings they use on large buildings. The cube might be a little extreme, but it will be interesting to see what it does. You'll have to get a bass tuner app and tune the bungies.

I did the sand earlier this year. You need to tamp the tube until the sand settles. You can add a significantly more amount of sand when you do. All it takes is tapping the sides of the extrusion to make it vibrate.

Thomas, I have a couple suggestions for the next video in the series... First of all, thanks for showing us what doesn't work. The early rocket scientists had a saying, "Fail big, fail fast" so they wouldn't waste time and efforts that wouldn't be ultimately productive. Please try making these quick checks on the system - they may point you (and us) in a better direction. Try tightening and loosening the belts when repeating test models. This might give us an indication of wether we need to absorb vibration being transmitted to the print or if the belts are a source of the oscillations. Then, you could compare different types of belts and look for different results. This might be done scientifically off the printer... If the print head velocity is known, measuring the ringing in the print could determine it's frequency. You could then suspend varying weights from belts and vibrate them at that frequency to see what belts might oscillate or dampen that movement. I suspect that CNC machines benefit from sand dampening because the multi-flute tools are turning and hundreds of rpms, creating chatter at several khz. Printers are operating at much slower resonances, so I expect that most problems are within the motion system itself. However, I will look forward to your next videos and learning what you discover. Keep up the great work!