Friday, February 7, 2014

Misadventures in Additive Manufacturing

I've had my eye on 3d printing for awhile... so guess what's in this box!


That's right, it's a 3d printer! A 2013 Printrbot Simple to be exact. I went to a 3D printing expo last weekend so I finally decided to get one. The printer came as a kit that I had to build myself. I got it on Tuesday around noon and I got it built to how it looks in the picture below by around  2AM that night.


Unfortunately they left out the power cable so I had to synthesize my own. I cut the plug from an old computer and I soldered it to a female bullet power connector. I'm actually really happy with how this cable turned out, just look at those heat shrinks!


I got it printing by the next day. I stared out with a calibration object that I found on Thingiverse shown on the right below. I spent some time trying to get the filament to extrude correctly and getting the bed at the right level. After looking at the object all day at school I designed a counter part for the calibration object so they could be put together to form a cube (shown on left). I made it in Sketchup and you can download the stl here to print out yourself.


I printed out a companion cube too!


I switched to green PLA filament and it works much better than the red filament for some reason.



I started printing a "cute" octopus SD card holder late last night.


Unfortunately the filament got tangled up while I was sleeping and the print didn't finish. The below picture is how far it got. I'm planning on reprinting it tonight.


Some tips I learned:

  • The laser cut extruder was a pain. There was a feeder tube that sat above the hot it and they were difficult to align and a slight misalignment caused it to be too difficult to extrude material. The solution I found was to just get rid of the feeder tube, you really don't need it.

  • Leveling the bed is really important. If the bed is too far from the hot tip then the first layer turns out to be squiggly and ugly. If this is happening raise the bed so it's only a few fractions of a millimeter from the print head. I actually use blue painters tape to fine tune the leveling.



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