REQUEST Repairing a damaged Material Station (there are a few images inside here)

[glx 28]

Hello,

 

I probably need some guidance and diagnostic on a damaged Material-Station.

 

I bought a used Material Station on a online marketplace, sadly the seller didn't pack it up properly, basically two layers of bubble-wrap and some not-fitting chunks of styrofoam in a box barely larger than the station. That combined with the most likely not so careful handling of the shipping service resulted in the unit coming in in a pretty bad shape, the box wasn't too much beaten up, it was an old box from another device, so it was a little difficult to tell from the outside if there was a damage or just an old cardboard box. 

Long story short, unpacking it revealed the poor thing pretty beaten up and lost chunks of material on both side panels, the glass was surprisingly intact, didn't expect that regarding the damages on the enclosure. 

 

   

 

  

 

I did contact the seller immediately which was very kind and admitted this was his fault and offered to take the unit back but he'll be on vacation until mid of April and he'll take it back then. Unfortunately because of the insufficient packaging transport-insurance won't cover any damages (and it wasn't properly insured anyways). Sending it to a repair shop would probably not be economical and it would probably end up as a parts donor or on a landfill. I have some experience repairing Ultimaker printers and since he is quite a nice guy and seemed to find an acceptable solution we agreed on me checking up the unit to figure out if it is just a "cosmetic" damage, he'll cover at least the cost of the replacement parts needed and we'll find a solution here. 

 

So I did fully unpack it, take some pictures and tried wiring it up to my S5. The obvious damages included the two cracked side panels, some apparently bent metal parts and one loose screw on one panel. Initially the unit was dead-ish, it did some kind of stuff, but didn't light up (besides blue indicator lights on the material bays), wasn't recognised by the printer and the connected Air-Manager was also not recognised. 

 

Looking around on the outside I did spot a hole to peek into the unit and spotted a loose connector dangling around, so I thought that might be a cause, looking from the other side (from inside the station) I could spot the socket that should be in, on the PCB where the UMB-connectors are located. I did also see the loose dehumidifier unit, but didn't recognise it was loose since I didn't know how it was supposed to look (wondered how it works  tho, since it was sitting in the middle of the compartment. 

 

 

 

 

I continued with opening up one of the panels to get access to the connector and reattached it to its socket counterpart. 

 

 

Since I noticed that the bottom cover was also dislocated I quickly took two further bolts out and removed the cover. Inspecting the bottom electronics didn't reveal any obvious damage, the connectors were all in place and the feeder-units were accurately in place and fixed with no wobbling.

 

After putting everything back in place I decided to give it another shot and it surprisingly did come back to life after a few minutes of a loading screen and restarting (I guess it updated its firmware). The Air-Manager was also properly recognised.

 

 

 

I did then try some basic functions like loading spools, which worked on all bays and all ports and did also recognise the NFC-tags in all bays. 

 

After googling around a bit, I noticed that the holes I saw the connector through was not supposed to be open but to be attached to the exhaust-ports of the dehumidifier, so I removed all spools again, disconnected the Material Station and tried to access the dehumidifier, after taking out like every bolt that's connected to the top panel (discovering a broken mounting point for the loose bolt that did fly of), I noticed that there are two bolts in the black top to remove which allowed access from the top. The dehumidifier was kind of wedged into the compartment and was firmly held in place by the (bent and split) exhaust pipe, so it wasn't obviously dangling around so I didn't notice that it was actually displaced before. 

 

Getting the unit itself in place was quite simple, the exhaust-pipe was a little more fiddly but worked out in the end. I didn't take pictures here sadly. 

 

After reassembling and reconnecting the Material Station I did load some spools and gave it a try printing something which worked fine. 

 

 

 

By now I have printed from all material bays, from every port and did an automatic filament change which all worked fine. 

There are also no obvious error messages and no weird noises, the dehumidifier does also work and keeps the moisture between 15 and 20% rH. 

 

My current plan is to keep the Material Station and get the required side panels (respect for them for protecting the glass door with their own well-being) as well as the top one with the damaged mounting point, for the slightly bent parts I'll try to simply bend them back first since they don't seem to be affecting the structural integrity. 

 

Are there further diagnosis steps I can take (like getting debug information or something) to verify everything is going as expected? Are there repair-manuals that can be obtained for such cases?

 

Edited April 3, 2024 by glx

[Dustin 178]

UltiMaker does not provide direct support via the Community.. 
But i'm impressed with what you have done and will offer some advice.

You can find a bunch of content to dig thru on the knowledge base..
I would recommend reviewing each ER code and what they mean.. even if your not seeing the errors some will give you additional points to self inspect for potential issue later.
https://support.ultimaker.com/s/topic/0TO5b000000Q4xpGAC/material-station-operation
https://support.ultimaker.com/s/topic/0TO5b000000Q4xrGAC/material-station-troubleshooting

Material Station is not really recommended to be serviced by a end user.. Rather only serviced by UltiMaker or a authorized Partner in your region.. Your S5 is generally considered end user serviceable in contrast..
There is A LOT that can go wrong poking around in that unit.. im very impressed with what you accomplished though.

I would recommend checking inside the unit again for damage on any of the merger or feeder systems and that they are secure etc.. 
An improperly packaged Material Station that is shipped.. can usually lead to total loss damage to the unit due to damaged internally from impacts or significant vibrations the unit encounters. Some parts can break off their mounting points and smash into other parts causing excessive damage to other plastic parts and some cases the main PCB board.
The cost of replacement for some of these components often make it unreasonable to replace outside of warranty  vs cost of new unit.
*Note: Warranty does not transfer.

[glx 28]

@Dustin Thanks for having a look :). I'll look through the support pages you provided 🙂. Yeah I suspected there can be a lot done wrong (especially since I've basically never seen a Material Station before 😅), so I just did the bare minimum and superficial things so far. 

 

There's probably not much warranty left to claim (would most likely not cover the damage anyways) since the unit was manufactured in 2019, so maybe one of the first ones ever made. Even having it checked up by a service partner would probably be unreasonable from an economical standpoint. It's besides that in a pretty good shape and doesn't appear too badly used tho. 

 

So servicing it by myself seems like the only option for gifting it some further life. 

[Dustin 178]

Yea 2019 would be long out of warranty.. 
There was also no ESP option offered to extend the warranty on Material Stations. 
 

[glx 28]

I'll just post a quick update, maybe it's useful for someone in the future :). 

 

The replacement parts just came in this week and I replaced the side panels. I initially also wanted to replace the top metal panel too, but the damage didn't seem to be too important for the structural integrity, so I decided to repair it instead. 

 

Very important: The front glass door is basically only held in place by the side panels, if you remove one it can easily fall out (and break, that's an expensive part), so I highly suggest to hold it in place with some tape. It is hold in place a little by the magnets that hold the door shut, but I wouldn't rely on that when working on the station.

Also if you have no experience with repairing or at least maintaining printers, I wouldn't recommend touching that thing.

 

To begin with, unload all materials from the station, disconnect it from power and remove the printer so you have the bare station in front of you. Place it somewhere you have some space to work and cover the area with a cardboard-sheet or something soft so nothing gets scratched. 

 

Carefully lay the station on its side, so the left panel faces up (be careful, it's quite heavy as you may have noticed).

The left panel is straight forward to replace, just unscrew all bolts and lift the panel off. It might come of a little hare since the back part has some tight fit. There are bolts in different lengths used, I did just mark directly on the panel with tape where which length was used. 

 

I didn't take too many pictures with the left panel removed, because it wasn't that spectacular. The antenna of the NFC-reader is probably the most exiting thing: 

 

 

The right panel is a little more tricky, since there's the end-stop and dampening for the front door attached. Also remember to have the door secured.

The two bottom holes that aren't present on the left panel hold the door dampening:

 

To prevent everything from falling apart, remove all bolts that hold the right panel in place. Leave the bolts from the dampening assembly in place but loosen the screws a little (if you unscrew them completely by now the assembly will fall into the station and you'll have to rescue it. 

 

Carefully lift the panel up but leave it roughly in place, you can spot what's going on under there:

 

The assembly should have around 2-3mm space so you can proceed.

 

You can then carefully (somehow everything has to be done carefully here :D), rotate the loose panel around the axis of the dampening arm until you can reach into the gap to hold the dampening assembly. If there's a resistance feelable you may have to loosen the bolts a little more. In theory you can completely remove the bold heading to the back without it falling apart but I didn't have a good feeling having it just flapping around on one bolt while moving the panel. 

 

You can then remove the back-heading bolt, supporting the plastic piece with your hand and dislodge the metal arm so the panel becomes free.

 

The panel can then be removed and the dampening-assembly unscrewed to transplant it to the new panel. To reattach the panel just do the above steps in reverse. 

 

Since the top panel was also damaged I had to do some additional steps (before reattaching the side panel):

First removing the black top, it wasn't super-obvious to me first, there are two bolts on the top you have to unscrew, them the cover can be lifted upwards and be slided out the slots in the back to remove it (if you also have to do that, I'll remove the top before the side panel).

 

The damaged part on the top panel was a threaded stand-off (the front right one) that broke away.

To access that area the plastic part that holds the LED lighting and the retention levers (or how these are called) that hold the spools in place had to be removed. It's pretty easy, you have to remove five screws, four directly hold the plastic assembly, the central one also holds the magnetic sensor that detects if the door was opened. When removing that part take care for the LED-lighting wiring, since it's hooked into the metal panel.

 

The "sealings" for the door do also have to be removed, they are just clipped in: (the picture is taken during reassembly)

In case you forget that, they will just fall off (oops).

 

To repair the standoff, I quickly designed a small block (11x30x5mm) with a hole for an M3 treaded insert and printed it as a solid ABS part on my UM2 Go. 

Looked like this when done and the insert molten in: 

 

I did then straighten the bent metal part of the panel, roughed up the printed ABS-part and the metal and epoxyed the thing in place: (not sure why one of the pictures is upside down)

 

After fully dried:

 

After the epoxy fully dried, I reassembled everything back in place.

 

Next I moved on to removing the bottom panel to invenstigate the remaining internals I haven't inspected yet.

I placed the fully assembled station upside down, be careful doing so, since the handle sticks slightly wider up than the top of the station (or probably just straight even, but I didn't want the station stand on that), so I placed it at the edge of my table.

Before proceeding it's very important so secure the door, since we are manipulating both side panels that hold the door. 

To remove the bottom panel, the bottom most bolts on both side panels have to be removed and for better accessibility the four bolts one row above have to be loosened a little so the panels can be slightly loosened to remove the bottom, it's held in place by slots in the back and these studs on the side. 

Here are some pictures from the inside:

 

Since everything was in place, properly secured and intact I reattached the bottom.

Here's how it looks with the new panels: 

 

And the broken ones 🫠: 

 

Lastly I assembled the printer-setup back together and it looks nice again now 😀: (the small bottom dresser fits so perfectly, it nearly appears to be an OEM part 😅)

 

Became a little long for a quick update but maybe it helps someone in the future or is at least interesting to someone 🙂

 

[Andrew_F 0]

also impressed by what you've achieved. Well done.