I’ve tried various rails providers, such as Aves, jc-arms and parts-dispensed, but none of them ever fit in the frame perfectly without rattling or moving around, or they don’t fit with a gen 3 spring front pocket. Essentially, none of them fit without wobbling or having the pin walk during working the slide or dropping the slide stop and letting it go forward on its own. I use a P1S, have ran the auto calibration and calibrated temp, pa, flow, etc. I’ve watched the DD17 assembly video by Ivan several times, and in his video, the rail go into the front pocket with minimal wobble, then he installs the pin, which needs a hammer, but every time I print a frame, I insert the front rail and the pin, but it’ll rattle with a lot of extra space and move around in the frame instead of having minimal wobble and being tight into place. Why is this? Is there something wrong with my printer? Or is it the rail providers?
My problem with Aves is that when I installed the front rail and inserted the pin, it wouldn’t be tight, and I could move the rails side to side, which causes the pin to walk, and the front rail would also be able to be shifted upwards when I use my finger on the rear of the rail, which leads to it no longer being parallel to the frame until I release it with my finger.
jc-arms has been better, but they are out of tolerance when trying to use gen 3 spring frames and you have to tap the front rail in very hard, but the pin still didn’t line up.
parts-dispensed also has the same problem as the Aves and the pin isn’t tight at all, and just falls out.
I use the correct sized drill bit and have no other problems with frames other than this front rail. Any ideas? Because I’ve been at this far longer than I’d like to admit.
I’ve had similar issues with front rails being loose. It seems like most designs just have a bit too much clearance. Side to side play can be fixed by shimming with pieces of metal from soda cans. One layer shoved between the rail and frame on either side of the rail. For the rocking I’ve reduced that by melting small areas of the frame plastic with a hot nail to fill in the gap between the front and/or back of the rail and the frame. Like staking an AR-15 castle nut or bolt carrier if you’re familiar.
As far as the pins walking, I’ve ended up using a size smaller drill bit (whatever imperial size is just under 3mm) for cleaning up frame holes to keep them from getting too big. Then dry fitting the pins and drilling the holes a bit more until they fit snugly. You could also stake the front rail pin in using a hot nail like the rail. Or a dab of super glue.
I’m thinking maybe I should just use the pins as drill bits on each side of the frame to ensure a perfect fit instead of using drill bits directly. Are there any other rail providers that fit with no additional modifications needed? I’ve only tried a few, but have seen others such as maf corp, 5dtactical and wojtek.
I’ve only used Aves rails so I’m not sure how others compare. But the front and rear rails, and the locking block, from Aves have all worked fine for me. Another option could be bedding the front rail with epoxy or something.
Do you think that a roll pin might do a better job at holding the rail tight into place compared to just a regular dowel pin?
I’ve done two glock builds with aves rails, one dd19.2 in pa6-gf and one mp-17 in pla, both with aves rails, the front rails fit in snug every time.
Have you done dimensional calibration using something like the calilantern? It gives you an object that you can print, which you measure at many different points to help produce a configuration that makes your printer output exactly what it should.
What I do is perform the auto calibration on the Bambu Lab P1S, then I run through OrcaSlicer’s calibration toolbox. Usually when people have fitment issues, it’s related to the print being undersized though, not oversized.
