Prusa MK3 hard foot

thingiverse

I was trying to find a solution for the vertical lines in the printing on my MK3. There's a thread in the Forum about bracing the Z axis, which made me think that the printer's soft, low hysteresis flexible feet might be causing the z frame to vibrate about the x axis and result in print artifacts. I quickly replaced the rubber feet with some "hard" ones and noticed an improvement in the condition right away. These were printed in PLA at 50% fill rate, and they have a recess in the bottom face to accept 13mm x 4mm self-adhesive vinyl bumper pads that keep the machine from sliding around. I used six feet to replace the four flexible ones, placing four of them in the original positions and two additional ones about 25mm in front of the Z axis frame. Inserting and twisting them a quarter turn made it easy to locate them. I did see a nice improvement in the vertical line issue. I included the .SAT and .123X files so they'd be easy to customize and refine. I printed these on my Makergear M2E but installed them on my Prusa I3 MK3, and I'm thinking about making some for my Makergear too. Have fun! Edit: 03/21/2018. I added three pictures showing the results of the test on a piece I designed specifically for testing. The test part was printed in two steps using Inland PETG. I started the print on the original soft feet and paused it at 50%. Then, I switched to six of the hard feet with vinyl and restarted the print so that the lower half of the print is with soft feet.