TIM

Made by: @1Mon

Repository link: https://github.com/2Mon/tim

Total hours: 35

Feb 15 2026 | Research

ive been wanting to make a silly printer for a while. I came across some cool motion systems from OYO, the person who made POYON. I was inspired by his design for a CoreXZYZ, which he called MOT. I was talking with some friends and they showed me MIR, which is another printer made by Apsu. It uses the same motion system. Neither design had much progress outside of the motion system, so I want to flesh it out a bit and make a working machine. Also, OYO’s design has some weird mounts for the idlers. Its kinda impossible to use as is, so I will be expanding the frame a bit to make it easier to fit everything in.

This is OyO’s design with the impossible idlers. He seems to design motion systems without caring if they are usable lol.

This one is MIR, and while it is more fleshed out it still needs a toolhead.

I want to keep the compact size of OyO’s design while using the better XYZ (if we want to call it that) joints from MIR. I call it TIM. in theory because its MIR and MOT combined and reversed, but also tim is a cool name.

Time Spent: 2h

Feb 20 2026 | Motor Mount

I really like the way that OyO laid out the motors in his design. Since I am trying to bring this to RMRRF, I need to keep this small enough to fit in a suitcase. I set up the motors so that the bodies are on the inside, right below where the build plate will go. I think that I will end up doing an external electronics bay on this, so this will help keep everything super compact. I am using two bearings to make the belt go to the edge of the motor, maximizing the xy travel while keeping the footprint very small. I can probably fit this as a carry on.

This part also includes mounting for the four Z rods, which currently just slot into the holes. I should probably add a way to constrain them better. I dont plan to have an actual extrusion frame around this machine, so those rods need to be super rigid in the printer part.

And here you can see it with the motors, z rods, and bearings.

Time Spent: 4h

Feb 25 2026 | Gantry Stuff

Making the gantry for this is going to be VERY difficult. I am trying to keep it compact, and the belt path is not exactly easy to make compact. My first iteration turned out to be impossible to make IRL. there were sections that were WAYY too thin to be able to print well and stay stable during prints and under belt tension. Heres that first design:

I ended up changing up the belt path a tiny bit from this version, as the innitial setup didnt really allow a lot of space for the belt to be able to pass over the bearings. I changed it to have the single side of the bearing (wow i need a better name for this) be further out on the rod, which restricts my travel a bit but ends up making the belt path MUCH easier.

Here is my current design. It uses 125mm long 8mm linear rods and F693ZZ bearings for the belts to ride on.

And here it is with the bearings and rods. Its a little difficult to see how it will go together.

And here it is in the context of the rest of the machine. You can kinda see how the belts will go up from the motors to the gantry and back down.

Time Spent: 6h

March 1-5 2026 | XY Stuff

Outside of the weird Z axis, this printer is basically just a messed up cross gantry machine. So I need all the hard parts of a cross gantry, while getting literally 0 benefits. yay. Cross gantry is a bit weird to design around, as toolheads need to have a lot of room for the carriages/bearings.

I started off my design with the XY rods. I innitially used 8mm rods, which you can see here.

It is fairly simple, basically just two more 8mm rods with bearings on them, with printed parts to connect them to the other bearings. I plan to have the bearings press fit into the parts for simplicity. After attempting to design a toolhead for this, I realized that the 8mm rods would be wayyy too big for the tiny nature of this machine.

I switched to 6mm rods with carbon bushings instead of bearings. This means that instead of a 16mm hole for the bearing, its only an 8mm hole which makes packaging a lot easier.

These are the bushings I am going to use, specifically 6x8x20mm. This should give me a good balance between rigidity and compactness, which I REALLY need to optimize in this machine. I want to keep the outer dimensions within 200mm so I can bring it on a plane.

I started to design a toolhead around these bushings, using a TZ6 at the start, and then moving to a TZE3, and then to a bambu hotend. I needed something that was small so that I could get as much travel as possible.

This was my first idea for the layout of the toolhead. very compact but not really easy to design around.

I made a big block to try laying it out, but I ended up realizing that I wouldnt be able to get full travel, which you can see here. The bed in this image is 72mm, which is pretty close to the 60mm that I am trying to get.

I could have offset the bed a bit but I decided that that would be really ugly and I didnt want to do that. I was also experimenting with colors that I wanted to do for the printer. I think I’m gonna do this cool shiny pink stuff. Because why not. Pink is cool.

Next, one of my friends gave me the genius idea to use a 2 in 1 out hotend. Most of my issues were coming from the fact that hotends are always going to be centered around the bowden input, meaning that I would need to offset it so that the linear rods dont interfere with it. I had the idea to make the bowden tube kink around the rod, but i decided that that would be too annoying and weird. I discovered the E3D Cyclops hotend, which is a 2 in 1 out hotend. By some miracle, the rod can go right between the two bowden tubes. Its perfect. Its also incredibly silly, and will let me do multi color on this stupid thing. Heres a pic of how it looks.

The rod can go right through the middle and the bowden tubes can come out around them. Its awesome. Its also really cheap on aliexpress. Overall 10/10. I needed to do some little changes to some of the parts, including the xyz joints to allow for some extra travel so the nozzle can reach the whole bed. This is what the new part looks like.

I think that overall its an improvement. Part uses less material, i get to mess with a cool hotend, and i get to have fun. win win win.

Lastly, I added a top plate for the printer. Currently its very simple and just holds the bearings for the z idlers. In the future I want to add a place for people to be able to sign it during RMRRF, as well as hold the extruders.

should I develop my own silly dual extruder? maybe. would be funny.

Time Spent: 10h

March 10-11 2026 | Bed + Belt Clamps

In this session I added the bed and the belt clamps to the gantry. The design of the belt clamp is fairly simple, just teeth cut out in the part where the belt can go, and a clamp to go on top of it to squeeze it into the teeth. The clamp part is held down with a M3 bolt going into a heatset insert, for simplicity. For belt tensioning, I plan to have the top frame (which holds the top idlers) be able to move up and down, which lets me tension the belts. For now I just put four screw holes in the top of the frame, which I can use to push screws through and push the frame up against the z rods.

I also added the electronics bay in this session. Currently it is just a JLCMC aluminum electronics box, which is cheap and should be able to hold everything well. It is exactly the same size as the base of the printer, which is cool.

Here you can see the electronics (LDO PSU, SKR PICO, Raspi 4B) in the electronics box. I may end up switching to a lower profile electroniccs box to make the printer more space efficient.

I also added the bed during this session. Its a 3.175mm aluminum sheet with countersunk holes for m3 bolts. Those bolts go through sillicone spacers and into heat set inserts in the frame. I added a tiny little sillicone heater to the bottom, which I plan to design myself and get manufactured by JLC.

The bed size is currently 64x64mm. Just barely enough for a benchy!!

I had to do a bit of redesigning to the XYZ joint, as the belt clamps were running into some parts of the joint. All I did was take the idler bearing and move it into the part a bit further. This should help a lot with getting everything compact. The hotend I chose is very large so I need to maximize the space I have.

Time Spent: 6h

Toolhead + Bed

In this session I redesigned the toolhead. Before it was just a brick and now its a slightly nicer looking brick. I had to do some funny shenanigans to make the bolts for the hotend fit in between the hotend itself and the bushings. The toolhead is designed to be printed on a 45 degree angle, which makes it easier to print and not need any supports. I really like this, and its one step on my process towards getting better at 3dp DFM. The screw mounting for the hotend uses a total of 6 screws, three on the top and three on the side. This should make it super stable. I plan to print this out of PET-CF or ABS-CF.

For the bed, I designed a custom sillicone heater using the onshape drawing features. Its not the cleanest drawing but it should be good enough for JLC to understand it. It is basically just a 50x50mm pad with wires. There arent many off the shelf options at this size, and this ends up being cheaper than the only other option. I love JLC.

Time Spent: 5h

Extruder

This was a pretty quick session. I added the dual extruder. Since my hotend is 2 in 1 out, I need two extruders. I also want this printer to be extremely small, so my solution was to make the extruder able to fold down into the frame of the printer for travel, and fold out for use. Im using two HGX Lite extruders (which end up being cheaper than printed ones), mounted on a printed frame with a printed hinge connected to the top frame. I love making these hinge things. Maybe i can find some other stuff I can fold in. Thats for later me to think about. Now I need to write the readme and wrap everything up. I made a BOM already, but I need to add the extruder and stuff to it. Maybe Ill add a hardware kit, but I already have a ton of M3-5 hardware.

Extended position Retracted position

Something cool is that this printer is small enough to be a personal item on my flight. I think that I will add a wood frame around it to protect it a bit during travel.

Time Spent: 2h