Misadventures in Additive Manufacturing #3 - VlogBot

Welcome back to my blog series about printing in three dimensions! I've been a little busy and I feel bad for neglecting my blog a little bit. So here's a video of me awkwardly stumbling around in conversation to myself:


Probably the coolest thing I've printed out so far is this gear heart. I got the model off of Thingiverse. It took almost an entire weekend to print because I had to print it one piece at a time. I recently saw a version of this on thingiverse with a motorized stand which I might try to printout for an awesome looking display.

Misadventures in Additive Manufacturing #2 - BrokenBot

Hello and welcome back to my misadventures in additive manufacturing, a blog series that documents my exploration of the wonderful and potentially very frustrating world of 3d printing. Most recently I purchased a Printrbot simple kit and got it to function in about two days.

Recently I've been trying to print this large 'cute octo says hello' that I found on thingiverse. Unfortunately the print always takes about 2 - 4 hours and it keeps stopping due to things like tangled filament. So now I have three half printed octopi.

I was getting frustrated with the print so I scaled down the octopus to 30% and printed with a less dense infill and got it printed in just 8 minutes! Which was convenient because I had to leave for the day.

Also I printed some cuddling cats. :3

Unfortunately I was printing out a small companion cube from portal yesterday and the machine stopped mid print. :< 

I received an error message saying 'timer expired' and now I always receive a 'no such file or directory' every time I try to connect. I've checked all the wire connections multiple times and I tried rebooting my system multiple times with no success. Which means that something's wrong with the printer it's self. -.- I sent a support ticket to Printrbot and I think they're sending me a new controller board. Unfortunately that means I won't be up and printing again until next weekend. :< So that means I'll have to find something to keep me busy in the mean time. Maybe I'll try to master illustrator for my graphic design class or something.

Anyways, I'll continue posting about my misadventures in additive manufacturing here soon. My next post will be when I finally get my printer up and running again! Have a picture of 3d printed bottoms of octopodes: 

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.