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Ch 00Before you start

Before you start Chapter 00

Before you start · Chapter 00 — Before you start

Inventories the kit against its own batch BOM, settles the tools and consumables, verifies the flat reference, teaches heat-set inserts, and cleans and greases all seven rails — so that Ch 01 can start the moment the frame extrusions come out of the box and no later chapter stops for a missing tool.

What you're building in this chapter: nothing yet — this chapter builds the conditions for everything else. Four things come out of it. A counted kit: every box checked against your own batch's bill of materials, so a shortage is a Fabreeko email today rather than a stalled evening in six weeks. A working bench: the tools bought, the consumables ordered, and a flat reference surface verified with a straightedge and feeler gauges, because the frame's squareness in Ch 01 can be no better than the surface it is built on. A heat-set technique: the brass tip fitted to the soldering iron and an iron temperature found on a scrap coupon, ready for the ~150 brass inserts that give printed parts their metal threads. Seven prepared linear rails — the hardened steel bars and ball-bearing carriages that carry the toolhead, the gantry and the gantry's four corners — degreased of their shipping oil, packed with grease, wiped and labelled. Rails can only be greased before they are bolted down, which is why they are done here and not in the chapters that use them. Roughly half of this chapter happens months before the cartons arrive — the two headings Before the kit ships and Kit day below say which steps belong to which day; the step numbers stay in bench order.

Revali out of the carton
Kit day is a counting day. The printer inside the box is currently a rumour.

Time: 2.5–4.0 h hands-on, first build (survey §5.1 P00). Rail prep is roughly half of it.

Sessions: 9 × ~30 min — the Pause: lines below break the chapter into 9 segments; every minute figure is a first-build estimate.

Prerequisites:

  • Print batch B00 — Calibration & jigs (print/B00-calibration-and-jigs.md). B00 prints months before the Voron kit lands, and its gate is in two parts. Gate A (the cube, Step B00.5) and Gate B (Step B00.7 — the 625-2RS bearing in the z_drive_retainer_a bore and all seven inserts in the Heatset_Practice coupon, on the bearings and inserts ordered at Step 00.9) are both long passed by kit day, and all 22 plates are printed and binned. Steps 00.13–00.16 are Gate B's insert item. One row of Gate B is left for kit day: the MGN12_rail_guide on a real MGN12 rail, run out of carton 1 before the inventory starts. This chapter needs the Heatset_Practice coupon and both rail-guide sizes off that plate; nothing else from B00.
  • The kit itself, unopened — for the Kit day steps only. Fabreeko order F6424626, pre-order, ETA late November to late December 2026 (Fabreeko tracking page 2026-09-14: batch still in manufacture; watch for the status to flip to shipped, which starts a ~5-week clock).
  • Nothing else. This chapter has no assembly prerequisites — it is the first thing you do.

Tools

  • Digital caliper, 150 mm
  • Machinist square, 150 mm, DIN 875/2 or better
  • Flat reference surface (the kitchen stone counter, verified in Step 00.10)
  • Steel rule / straightedge ≥ 600 mm
  • Feeler gauge set
  • Temperature-controlled soldering iron that accepts 900M-T tips (Hakko FX888D-style sleeve with a thumb ring) — the LDO brass insert tip in the kit will not fit anything else. src
  • LDO brass M3 heat-set tip (supplied in the kit)
  • Hex drivers 1.5 / 2 / 2.5 / 3 / 4 mm — kit wrenches or the Fabreeko precision set
  • Flush cutters
  • 10 ml syringe with a blunt tip (grease delivery), or use the grease tube nozzle
  • 2 mm drill bit (supplied), 2.5 mm slot screwdriver (supplied)
  • Clean towel, for drying the rails after the IPA soak

Consumables: IPA ≥ 90% (enough to cover a 400 mm rail inside its own shipping bag, seven times over); Super Lube 21030 synthetic grease; nitrile gloves; lint-free cloth; masking tape (labels, and the rail end stops); permanent marker.

Printed parts — batch B00, all Galaxy Black ASA on the Core One+

Parts arrive in the bins named below (see the bin map in print/README.md#bins); check the bin label's list before you start.

Looks like STL Bin Repo path Qty Colour
Voron_Design_Cube_v7.stl 00-jigs Voron-2 STLs/Test_Prints/ 1 Black
Heatset_Practice.stl 00-jigs Voron-2 STLs/Test_Prints/ 1 Black
MGN12_rail_guide_x2.stl 00-jigs Voron-2 STLs/Tools/ 2 Black
MGN9_rail_guide_x2.stl 00-jigs Voron-2 STLs/Tools/ 2 Black
pulley_jig.stl 00-jigs Voron-2 STLs/Tools/ 1 Black
z_drive_retainer_a_x2.stl 02-Z0 Voron-2 STLs/Z_Drive/ 1 Black

z_drive_retainer_a is on the jig plate as the bearing press-fit coupon — Gate B's bore test, Step B00.7 — and it is a real part you will fit in Ch 02; nothing is wasted.

Hardware (chapter totals)

Fastener / part Qty Note
Heat-set insert, brass, M3×H5 from the KADRICK kit already on the bench, not the Voron kit — the STL pockets are 5.0 mm deep with a ~4 mm bore; shank ~4 mm (verify on bench) 7 the practice coupon's seven pockets, set at Gate B (Step B00.7) months before the kit — Steps 00.14–00.15 are that session. All 153 kit inserts stay for the build; Step 00.13 borrows one as a tongue gauge and puts it back in tray C
— no other kit hardware is consumed in this chapter — 0 every rail and PCB goes back in its bag; the fasteners go into the printed trays (Step 00.12)

Read first

  • The rails ship dry and must be cleaned and packed before they go on an extrusion. The flip-and-pack method needs access to the back of the rail. Once a rail is bolted to a 2020 you cannot do this (survey §5.2 W9). src
  • A rail carriage will slide off its rail and spill its bearing balls, and dropping one ruins it. Tape every carriage in place the moment you unbag a rail — the MGN12 comes out first, at Gate B (Step B00.7), so tape it there — and fit the two end-stop bands before the soak (Step 00.17; manual p.24, p.26).
  • Heat-set inserts go in per print batch, before the part enters any assembly. One missed insert in an XY joint costs a gantry teardown (survey §5.2 W3).
  • Caliper the deck panel during inventory. LDO's guides say 4 mm, LDO's own BOM says 3 mm. This decides which deck_support_* you print, and it is a Ch 02 step, not a Ch 11 one (survey §4.3).
  • Post the two Discord questions on day one (Step 00.32). Both have multi-day answer latency and both gate work in Ch 08–Ch 10.

Sources for this chapter:

Video coverage (Steve Builds, pre-release LDO kit — differs from Rev D+): Part 1 @0:02:04 (+11m), Part 1 @0:12:11 (+8m), Part 1 @0:50:02 (+6m), Part 1 @1:54:10 (+39m), Part 1 @2:05:13 (+19m), Part 1 @2:32:52 (+32m), Part 1 @3:11:45 (+10m)

This manual also links timestamps from Steve Builds' eleven-part LDO Voron 2.4 Kit Build playlist — livestreams in which he assembles the pre-release "feedback" kit LDO shipped him in December 2021–January 2022 to review before the kit went on sale, the closest thing to a full video walkthrough of this machine. It is not this kit: Steve's build is Afterburner + Clockwork 1 on a BTT Octopus with a separate Raspberry Pi and a Euclid probe, where this build is Stealthburner + Clockwork 2 + Revo HF on a Nitehawk-SB V2 toolboard, a Leviathan carrying the Pi, an Omron inductive probe plus the LDO nozzle probe, and a Clicky-Clack door instead of the stock doors. Every step link that lands on a step where this matters carries a (differs: …) note; low-confidence links (the video's segment start rather than the exact moment) are collected instead in each chapter's Video coverage line, above. Links and timestamps only — no stills, clips, thumbnails, or transcript excerpts (assets/video/SOURCES.txt).

helperHelper steps: 14 · 00.2, 00.3, 00.4, 00.5, 00.6, 00.7, 00.10, 00.11, 00.12, 00.17, 00.20, 00.21, 00.25, 00.30

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