A normal 3D printer stops when the bed is full. A belt printer never does — the print rolls off the back on a moving conveyor while the next one starts, so you can print a part longer than the machine or queue up fifty of the same part and walk away. Here's how I converted a Creality CR-10S into one, and what it actually takes to get clean prints off a moving belt.
| Piece | What changes |
|---|---|
| The bed | A moving spring-steel conveyor belt replaces the fixed glass bed. Prints ride off the back as they finish. |
| The tilt | The whole gantry sits at an angle so the nozzle can lay a first layer onto a belt that's traveling underneath it. |
| Firmware | Marlin re-flashed and extruder e-steps re-calibrated so 100 mm asked equals 100 mm extruded. |
| Slicer | Belt-aware slicing that accounts for the tilt and turns the Y axis into "conveyor travel." |
| Control | OctoPrint, so I can start, watch and manage the queue over the network instead of babysitting the SD card. |
Two things a normal printer can't do, a belt printer does easily. First, infinite length: because the part keeps rolling off the back, you can print something far longer than the machine's footprint — a full-length wing panel, a fuselage section, a long channel. Second, true continuous production: line up a queue of the same part and it will print one, roll it off, and immediately start the next, unattended. For RC that's the dream — print a whole set of ribs, or ten of the same bracket, overnight without touching it.
The fixed bed comes off and a spring-steel conveyor belt goes on in its place, wrapped around rollers and driven by the Y-axis motor. Instead of the bed moving back and forth, the belt rotates, carrying finished print off the back like a tiny factory line. It's thin spring steel so it flexes around the rollers but stays flat and true across the print area, and it holds heat well enough for the first layer to stick. Belt tension and tracking matter a lot here — too loose and it wanders, too tight and it drags the motor.
You can't lay a flat first layer straight down onto a surface that's moving horizontally, so the entire print geometry is tilted — the gantry sits at an angle (commonly around 45°) relative to the belt. The nozzle lays plastic onto the belt at that angle, and as the belt advances, each new slice is added just behind the last. It looks strange the first time you watch it, like the printer is printing sideways, but that tilt is exactly what lets a moving belt and a printing nozzle coexist.
After changing the mechanics I re-flashed Marlin and re-calibrated the extruder e-steps — the number that tells the firmware how many motor steps equal one millimeter of filament pushed. The check is simple and worth doing on any printer: mark 100 mm up the filament from the extruder, tell the printer to extrude 100 mm, then measure what's left. If it pulled 90 mm you're under-extruding; adjust the e-steps value and repeat until asked equals actual. Get this wrong on a belt printer and every part in a long continuous run inherits the same error.
The last piece is control. I run the printer through OctoPrint so I can send jobs, watch a camera feed, and manage the queue over the network. That matters more on a belt printer than a normal one: the entire point is unattended, back-to-back printing, and OctoPrint is what lets you kick off a continuous run and check on it from another room — or another building — instead of standing over the SD card.
Honestly, it's a project in itself — belt tracking, first-layer adhesion on a moving surface, and belt-aware slicing all take tuning, and a stock printer is simpler if you only print one part at a time. But if you print RC parts in volume — ribs, formers, mounts, repeat spares — or you need lengths a normal bed can't give you, a belt printer changes what's possible on the bench. For me it pairs perfectly with printed-airplane work, where you're often making long, repetitive structural parts.
Why it fits: this conversion is a project in itself. If what you actually want is parts off the bench, this is the printer on my gear list for RC work today.
The spec that matters: a stock, supported machine — you queue parts and print, without tuning belt tracking or first-layer adhesion on a moving surface.
If you need a part longer than the bed: that's the one thing a stock printer still can't do — infinite length is where a belt machine keeps its crown.
The obvious companion build is my 3D-printed airplane — the Crackle Cub redemption covers what it takes to make a printed wing actually fly (spoiler: a carbon spar and the right speed). The 3D printing gear section lists the printer and filament I reach for, and the Airplane Designer is where a printable plane starts.
Auto-transcribed from the video, so expect the odd mis-heard word. Here so you can search or skim what was said without watching.
Hey guys and welcome back to my channel. My name is Eric, if you're new here hit the subscribe button. Today we're going to be talking about my Creality CR10, which I converted into a belt 3D printer. So let's get into it. Music So welcome to year 2018.
So I'm going to show you guys some footage that I shot when I was building this 3D printer. Music So it's a pretty simple process. I printed off these rollers and then there's a shaft that goes in the center of the rollers that connect to the motor. And then there's an idler on the back side that just rolls with the motor. And it worked out really well actually.
Music I originally, as you see here, I was using some aluminum foil to create the belt, which I thought might help keep the price down. And I wouldn't have to buy some special belt stuff. And I didn't really know what to get at the time either. So I tried that but it did not work. It tore very easily.
It was not very strong. So that on top of other things, I think it might have worked a lot better with my setup I have now. Because the setup I had back then was pretty bad. So one major thing I have changed since then is that I have drilled a hole through the shaft going through the front pulley. And this is to keep it from spinning.
So I was having problems with losing steps when it was during printing. So I found out the shaft was spinning inside of this. So I did this to fix that and it actually helped it. It definitely worked. So now I'm using some .06mm I believe spring steel sheet.
And it comes in a roll of 6 inches wide by like how long it needs to be. It's plenty long enough. I think there's a couple inches extra. But you can get wider. I just didn't.
I don't know that it's necessary right now. I didn't really intend this to be an infinite 3D printer. It's just to print multiple parts pretty quick. And it's actually worked out very well for that. So I had to also change some things in Marlin to get it to work right.
And I also had to adjust the E-steps on my Y-axis so that it would work right with the new arrangement that it has. Because the gear ratio of the belt moving to how much the motor has to spin to get the belt to get the belt plate to move back and forth is a little bit different. So I adjusted that all up and it's working very well. So fast forward three years. Today we are going to unbarry it and we are going to get it all working properly hopefully.
So let's get into that. Wow guys that looks a lot better. You can actually see me through it. Okay guys so that actually works fairly well. So what I'm thinking is I can add in this video detector plug-in to our octoprint setup.
So that's lower as by pie right here. And if we add this it will help it so it will just stop and it will just get you down and restart. So it would be super simple super smooth and hopefully it works. I'm going to install that right now. If it doesn't work then this might not be in the video.
Okay so I guess I can show you guys a little bit of how this works. So first we have our stepper motor here that's driving the Y-axis. So it goes around a little tumbler and there's a cupboard right here and there's an 8mm shaft in here. So on this side there's a stepper motor and this side as you see right there there's supposed to be a bearing. But I don't know why it's missing right now so it's making the whole thing slanted a little bit.
I have no idea how it's printing correctly. So if we come around the back side so you can see there's a bearing there. There's a bearing there and then these are just bolted down with T-nuts. And then the hot plate is just mounted here as you can see right across there. And then these are just kind of like sitting in there.
And as you see there the plate's not that level with it. So there's definitely a little bit of bug in the system. So let's put the bearing in there. Okay guys so I think we've got the printer working pretty good. So I think the next step would be to try some vases because there's something in vase mode or vase mode that you don't want to print two on one bed.
So I think this would be a great solution for that. So let's give it a shot. Oh hi there. If you guys are liking this video make sure you hit that like button and also subscribe to my channel so you can follow more of my videos. Okay guys this is looking pretty good.
Now I'm going to show you guys some footage that I had from an RC airplane that I'm printing out now currently. I'm just trying to print a bunch of parts to stress test it. What's been going on is it's been working really well for a while and then a part wears out and I have to figure out how to strengthen it and make it stronger. So it's really good information to get out of the printer. So the more hours I get on the printer the more information I get and the more reliable it gets.
But overall I'm pretty excited with it. Okay guys so as you see the belt printer is in right there and we got it moved over there and it's actually working fairly decent. Okay guys so I actually haven't showed you what I'm using to control this printer. So I'm using an octoprint setup so it's cooked up to my respirator pie so let's jump over and show you that here real quick. So here's my octoprint setup right here and you can see the printer in the new location.
So I have the screen of the camera and I'm using a Wyze cam with the webcam firmware that you can upload on Wyze.com slash firmware maybe I don't know. They have it on their website though and you can download that and install it on the computer. It's a pretty good camera for only $20 so it's pretty decent. And then you can go over you can see your temperature and you can control the printer. So if we go over to our apps and I installed a plugin which is continuous print.
So continuous print works so I can like this is all of my files in the program. So I can look through this file list and I can search hook for example. So here's a general purpose hook that I've imported the gcode for through Kira and I can just add this to the print queue. So I can tell how many so I say I want to print 10 hooks or what I can do is I should be able to loop it. So for example in the beginning I showed you guys these ice cream creams that I was printing.
So you need a you need the cream on the top and you need the cone so we can print the cone and the cream and then I can just loop that so that it will just go one second one second and it will just keep going back and forth printing every other one. So it works pretty good. I'm going to change it back to the hook right here to add this and then we can start our queue. So I think this continuous print plugin really makes this so much better because it makes it the ability that you can constantly update that list. So you can actively when it's printing you can add things to the bottom of the list so that it will get to it when it's done finishing the top.
So for example I printed that airplane as you saw earlier in the video and I can just put in all the files for the airplane push print and it should just like print one after another and it will just roll it off the end of the bed and jump to the next one. So it's really cool. So I'm still having some problems with the belt shifting a little bit but it's not too bad and I have worked it out for the most part. I'm still running some test prints getting it to work properly but it's doing very well. So thank you guys so much for watching.
You guys are awesome. If you have any thoughts on this please let me know in the comments and let me know your questions. And if you guys want to build this yourself I'm going to leave all of the information I have about it in the description below so you can go out there and build your own. So thank you guys so much for watching. You guys are awesome.
Have a great day. This inspires you to build something. Bye. Bye.
