Kirigami bed upgrade for Voron zero – installation guide

Intro

Have you noticed how much the stock z axis assemble flexes on your Voron zero? Whilst this never really affected my prints, it drove me mad when levelling the bed. The same pressure on the bit of paper at the back of the bed felt very different from the front leading to levelling the bed being generally much harder than it should be to get it perfect.

Thankfully christophmuellerorg had already developed a fantastic looking solution with a very wallet friendly price tag (at least compared to most things Voron). The Kirigami bed mod utilises a single laser cut sheet metal part which is bent to give it additional stiffness. Made of steel it should offer good improvements on bed stiffness as you have metal bolted directly to the z axis carriages rather than through printed parts.

Also well it looks ace!

DISCLAIMER: This part has been provided free of charge by Funssor for me to review. I will still aim to be impartial and notifying you that this was the case is part of my promise to you.

BOM

• Kirigami bed kit – Aliexpress

Assembly

Firstly inspect the bends on the part. I have seen a few reviews which indicate that their part came with the bends not quite perfect. Use a straight edge or ruler to see what yours looks like. A quick jump into the CAD confirms what the bends should look like.

In the repository for the kirigami bed there is a small bending assistant labelled ‘for suppliers which cannot bend past 90 degrees”. This appears to be most of the issue but I do seem to have a bit of a sideways misalignment as well.

10 minutes with a bit of brute force (I was too impatient to wait for the bending tool to finish printing) and I ended up with something that looked nearly perfect!

Happy that things fitted together and aligned I took the next step. Taking apart the printer. There wasn’t an obviously disassembly guide in the repository so I winged it a little. The process documented here may not be the most efficient order, but it was one that worked for me. Note things will be a bit harder for you if your electronics panel does not have the access holes provided on the LDO panel.

The first step was to move the bed down until it aligned with the holes in the electronics panel. From here I could poke an Allen key through and undo the two bolts on the back of the printed part which connects the leadscrew nut to the bed assembly. If you don’t have these holes later you will need to remove the Z axis end stop and wind the whole bed assembly right off the top of the leadscrew. (Apologies the picture of the holes shows the full assembly but I forgot to capture one before I did this step!). The bed assemble should now be free to move up and down.

Next remove the two bolts from above that hold the leadscrew nut into this printed part. You should be able to slide this part up and past the z axis end stop without having to remove it.

You should now have a bed assembly that can slide up and down the rails without the leadscrew needing to turn. At this point I placed the printer on it’s back – hanging slightly off the edge of the desk so I didn’t have to remove the spool holder!

Before you lift the z axis assembly out of the printer undo the bed levelling screws to allow the heated bed to be separated from the rest of the assembly. If you installed connectors to allow easy disconnection of the bed wiring you will thank yourself as having it flapping around gets a bit annoying later.

If you remember back to when you assembled the printer you will remember that the Z axis assembly was put together before the electronics panel was there. This means that to remove it the easiest option is to remove the whole thing with the linear rails. Remove the top half of the bolts then slide the bed up and remove the bottom half.

WARNING be very careful not to let the carriages slide off the rails – If you still have the little rubber stopper place them in the end holes on the rails as soon as you remove the bolts. If like me you either binned or lost them just be careful when removing the assembly from the printer. I opted to add cable ties through the holes as soon as the assembly was out of the printer to minimise the risk of me letting a carriage slide off.

Remove the rest of the parts from the linear rails. There are bolts that hole the printed parts to the extrusions that come from 3 different sides. Remove all of these and slide the extrusions out of the printed parts. The picture below shows the section you are trying to remove as a single piece.

You can then remove the last printed parts from the linear rails. This is a good opportunity to do some basic maintenance on the rails – I opted to just check they are still running smooth and add a little lithium grease.

Use the linear rail centre guides you used when assembling the printer and attach the rails back onto the vertical extrusions. leave the bolts on one of the rails a bit loose for now as we will use the assembly with the bed attached to set the exact position the second rails needs to be in.

Attach the cable chain printed part to the kirigami bed. (Do not attach the leadscrew part yet you will only have to remove it to assemble things in the next few steps… trust me I did made that mistake) Next attach the kirigami bed to the linear rails. Mine attached nicely after my manual adjustments (brute force bending earlier). If things don’t line up right now go away and adjust the bends in the plate until they do. because of how stiff the plate is you will get binding issues if you don’t get them right before assembling. Once that is attached it’s tiem to tighten up the rest of the linear rail bolts. Make sure to slide the bed up and down the rails as you tighten up the rest of the linear rail bolts to ensure you don’t have any points that are binding.

Next you can slide the printed part which will connect the kirigami bed to the leadscrew nut. I found it easiest access with to wind the leadscrew nut to around the mid position on the leadscrew so that you could access the bolts from above and below the assembly. Bolt the printed part onto the leadscrew nut first then bolt the kirigami bed onto the printed part.

Pop the heated bed assembly back on with the springs and thumbscrews and you are ready to test. I must admit it looks really nice! I still need to add the serial number plate onto the front but as that is an aesthetic only part I skipped it for now.

Testing

Before you run a print first check that the z axis moves nicely and the stepper doesn’t stall anywhere within the full range of movement on the axis.

Next run through the standard klipper commands to get your z axis offset and bed aligned nicely.

• Z_ENDSTOP_CALIBRATE (I do this in this case because it will likely have changed a lot from the previous z axis assembly)
• BED_SCREWS_ADJUST
• Z_ENDSTOP_CALIBRATE (I repeat it because again because it’s good practice to assume the the bed screw adjust step will cause a change in bed height even if only marginally)

Congratulations your new stiffer bed assembly is ready to play! Be warned though with greater stiffness comes a smaller margin for error… Remember to hit save_config! if you don’t then unsurprisingly the newly stored values are not saved after a power cycle. Now clearly I hadn’t printed this structural part with my normal printer part settings (5 top, bottom and sides, 40% infill) so the part wasn’t as strong as it should be however it had crashed into the bed a few times over it’s life prior to this without the same results. I am therefore counting this as a win for the stiffness of the Kirigami bed mod.