So there are also some mechanical things like akin to changing the oil in your car, for example, that we can do to our 3D printer to keep it in ship shape. I'm going to be demonstrating all of these things on my LulzBot printer, but as always, these things apply to all FDM printers. If you need particular help with your model of printer, either reach out in the comments below or take a look at the documentation that comes with your printer. Get in touch with the manufacturers if you still can't find it and ask them what they recommend to do for your particular model. So let's get into it, and the first thing that we're going to take a look at is these linear guide rods. Now, what you can notice sometimes as your printer is moving left to right, you can hear a weird screeching sound. For this printer in particular, we've got self-lubricating bearings in the extruder mount, so you don't actually need to lubricate those bearings, but you might need to clean them.

Again, we rely on just some trusty paper towel or maybe just a clean rag. All you do is just get that paper towel and give them a good rub down. You can give each one a good rub down, move that one along nice and gently, and just get these guide rods as clean as possible. You'll notice that there is a little bit of dirt coming off those. It's not a lot, like I said, they grease themselves, so it's not a bad thing to have happening, and you can just clean them like that. The next thing that we can do is check the threaded rods on each side of our printer. So that would be this rod here, which would be this one here, and what we'll do is we'll take what we do to fix those things. You might notice some z-axis wobble or something, and you might need to just grease those rods. For that, we grab some lithium grease. There's a link in the description below for the particular type of lithium grease that LulzBot recommends for these printers. You'll just put a small amount of grease at the top and the bottom of these z-axis mounts, and then you'll use the printer control software to move your printer up and down and try to get a nice even spread of that grease.

It's as simple as that. You'll do that to each side of your z-axis as well as those linear rods across the top for your tool head to travel nice and safely. Finally, we'll take a look at belt tension. You might notice after moving your printer around, not really for the LulzBot Mini and the aluminum frame, but for a printer with the aluminum extrusion bars, if you move your printer a lot or you're printing with it at higher speeds a lot, you might notice that the belts start getting a bit slack. So what you can do is actually tighten your belts in a lot of cases. I'm going to show you quickly where the belt tensioners are located. I'm not going to have to do that for this one because the belts are actually quite tight as they are and they come quite tight and it lasts a long time at that tightness. But I'll show you where they are really quickly. Just make sure I haven't got any cables plugged in the front. I'll turn this thing up like this. So what we'll do is take a look there. As you can see, these are our belt tensioners here. What we can do is just grab out the relevant hex key. We can just loosen those up. Once we loosen them up, we can grab some needle nose pliers to pull them tight. You just pull it tight and then tighten it back up.

What you're looking for is a pretty nice strum noise when you hit those belts. Additionally, you can also see these, turn this printer upside down now. Hopefully, everything's okay. You can also see those on the Y axes down the bottom of the printer right there. You can see those two belt tensions there for the Y belt. How do you know if you need to tension your belts? Sometimes you can notice that your shapes like circles and squares aren't printing like they used to. I've put a couple of pictures in the link below that you can have a look at, and that's the best way to see that you're going to need belt tightening. Essentially, your circles will start to become squares. Your squares will start to become rounded squares. Everything will look out of whack. That's pretty much the reason for it. Just tighten up the tension on those belts. If you need to replace them, grab a replacement belt and replace that belt. You'll notice the world of difference with your prints. Finally, the last thing that we can do just for a bit of mechanical maintenance, if that's what you call it for this particular one, is using those vents on the side of the control box and at the back. You can grab a can of compressed air and you can just blow out those vents to make sure dust isn't blocking up the vents and causing your control board to overheat, which is always good to do for any electronics that you have in a control box. So they're pretty much the quick and easy maintenance things that we can do for the mechanical side of our 3D printer.