Just Another RepRap

Check it out!

I printed the good one at 225C, 255 extruder speed, rotated so it’s correct (on it’s back).

The YouTube compression doesn’t quite do the piece justice, so here are some pics.

First, here are some early attempts:

Upper left is ABS printed vertically, upper right is ABS printed flat on its side, lower left is the my first PLA attempt (235C, 210extrspeed), lower right is my second PLA attempt (240C, 255extrspeed)

Then I lowered the temperature to 225C, and kept extrspeed at 255:

225C, 255 extrspeed. Looks good, but inside of recessed area is a bit rough.

Then I printed one more, this time rotated on its side, at 225C with an extrusion speed of 255 (edited the gcode file by hand). This final piece can be seen on the right in this next pic of all of the PLA attempts so far:

4 PLA attempts. The one on the far right is the excellent one.

Again, the one on the right is the best one. Printed on its side, 225C, 255 extrspeed.

Here are a few more pics of the beautiful piece. It feels like either something you’d expect from a super expensive 3D printer, or something you’d expect from outer space. Superman’s fortress of solitude comes to mind:

One last comparison shot – the piece on top in this next picture is the 225C printed vertically, and the piece below is the 225C rotated to print horizontally.

Looking around my work bench, not including any of the items in these pics, I count at least five other attempts that failed in ABS because of warping. PLA worked great, with no heated bed, and no raft. I did run into some problems where the extruder stopped printing because of some internal jam or backing up (guess), but I was able to fix that by setting the temp to 240 and extruding for a while.

Moving on to other pieces now.

Quick post. So Sunday night I had time to take out the supply of PLA (Polylactic acid, a clear biodegradable plastic that won’t warp like ABS) and give it a shot. I didn’t have any of the temperatures down right (temperature was 235C, extruder speed was 210), so it didn’t come out great, but here was my first attempt:

Might get to work on it again later tonight after everyone falls asleep – we’ll see.

Ok, a bunch of things to cover, with a bunch of pics. I’m looking forward to some serious progress after the holiday season is over.

First, there’s definitely a problem with at least batch VII [correction: batch VIII] of MakerBot which prevents you from using 6.9mm of the 100mmx100mm bed. If you look at the failure on the right in this pic:

…you can see at the bottom several loops of the raft where the raft went past the edge of the bed (over by 6.9mm). The top of the raft was 6.9mm in from the edge of the bed.

Ok. So next, here was my impatient attempt to create a heated bed. Rather than ordering a 100mmx100mm 5mm-thick sheet on the Internet like I should have, I went to Home Depot and bought a 12″x12″ sheet that was about 10 times too thin, then cut it into 9 4″x4″ sheets and bolted them all together:

Unfortunately I drilled the center 3 holes a bit off, and I had no magnet to hold it to the MakerBot y axis. Before I wired some nichrome wire up and kapton-taped it down, I put the whole thing on hold because I got access to a supply of PLA that Chris bought. (Still haven’t tried the PLA yet though).

Ok, so next, right before Xmas (when I was hoping to show my brother Jon and my Dad the MakerBot RepStrap), this acrylic retainer ring on the MakerBot broke, threatening to ruin my plans to show it off:

So luckily, when I was at Home Depot recently I bought a 5/8″ Forstner bit which I’d planned to use to make a centering jig for PTFE insulators so I could easily mark the center of the 5/8″ PTFE rods. I cut out a chunk of the MDF that I’m going to use for my Mendel bed, cut out the center hole, drilled the small screw holes and tapped them to M3 size with my newly acquired metric tap & die kit.

Success! Xmas was saved! Of course, it’d have been far better if that part was printed and I already had a printed spare lying around. This was a great illustrating example of why I’m building a Mendel and not just being satisfied with a MakerBot (no offense intended to MakerBot owners!). Printable parts = awesome.

Ok, so next, here were 5 presents I wrapped for Laurie, Emily, Alicia, Cara, and David:

They were the Letter Blocks posted on thingiverse. Here was the one I gave David:

I haven’t allowed myself to print many non-Mendel-piece things, because of my rush to get to a Mendel, but with xmas approaching and the realization that I wouldn’t come anywhere close to having a Mendel ready for another month or so, I decided to print a few things. Here’s my favorite so far:

(the bend in the tree is part of the actual model). I also allowed myself another attempt at printing the whistle, which looked awesome when printed but had enough air holes that it barely functioned at all:

Christmas morning, Laurie surprised me with the final gift of this insanely cool tool chest (that 10 months ago I wouldn’t have cared about, but now I absolutely love/need):

Here’s what a sample of my workbench looks like now, pre-toolchest:

Ok, yet another topic change (got whiplash yet?). While at my parents’ house showing off the MakerBot, we decided to ambitiously try printing Walt Disney’s head (despite the lack of a heated bed). There was insane curling, and a hell of a lot of noise (tip: don’t set up your MakerBot on a dinner table near the TV), but before I aborted the build, it printed this much:

There ya go! More progress next week, I hope. Once again, happy holidays everyone!

First off, Happy Holidays everyone! And although I hope to post before then, Happy New Year!

No pics today, as my iPhone is actually full (3000+ pics – it won’t let me take any more), and my linux box is giving me problems (which is where I need to dump those photos before I can take more).  Doh.

So I ran out of white ABS, and started printing with the supply of black ABS I’d purchased. I’d agree with similar posts I’ve seen online that it seems to have different properties.

I need a lazy susan for the ABS supply. When ABS comes off of the top of a coil, it twists too much and causes problems.

I have, in my possession, a supply of PLA that I want to use to print out some of the more difficult warping pieces. Now my problem is that I can’t get x-carriage-upper_1off (rotated) to fit on the bed. Before using the PLA, I wanted to try black ABS one more time, and for some reason the raft prints 7mm too close to me on the Y axis; there’s 7mm of space at the top of the bed, and the raft goes over the edge of the bed on the bottom by 7mm, even if I try starting the bed off-center before the print. That part has me confused. I tried adjusting the raft size down in skeinforge a bit (% of length and some other attribute), but that didn’t help. I’d actually let a black ABS run go when it did this, and it almost worked, but the part that ran over the edge had nothing to hold it down so it curled up and ruined the print.

I’d started building a heated bed but once the PLA came in I put that on hold, but I don’t want to try the PLA (at least for that piece) until I can get the piece to fit on the bed! Maybe I’ll try the extruder piece again, in PLA.

More later. Happy Holidays again everyone!

[UPDATE: After careful examination I've just verified that my MakerBot's Y axis physically can't go back far enough for the extruder to reach the last 6.9mm, and it can come forward enough that the extruder is 6.9mm past the front. I rechecked the build instructions (which are all based on a different batch of lasercut parts than mine, with different screw holes visible in the pics, etc), and it's assembled correctly. I think there's a design flaw in the lasercut parts for whatever batch my Makerbot is from. Sent mail to Zach. Meanwhile I'll try rotating the part around the z axis.]

My latest trend is to identify the easy-to-print pieces and get them out of the way, so I can worry about complex parts later (and address those either via slower printing and a hotter raft, or an eventual heated bed, or by printing those with PLA). So Friday night I churned out 11 parts:

Friday

Lots of parts.

y-bar-clamp_10off

also y-bar-clamp_10off

x-axis-side-plate-nut-jig_2off

I tried at least one other piece but without immediate success, since it’s one of the (many?) pieces whose default rotation is crazy.

This unusable piece basically printed upside down:

Went to bed, got like an hour of sleep, and took Cara to baby gym class. That means it had become Saturday.

Saturday

Printed out a bunch more parts today. I’m running out of “easy” parts. I think I’ve now completed 53 pieces.

y-belt-clamp_2off

again, y-belt-clamp_2off

z-driven-pulley_2off, top view

z-driven-pulley_2off, side view

z-drive-pulley-rim_4off still on the raft

Pieces of the sandwich of two rims and a pulley

The sandwich of two rims and a pulley. That looks so damned cool.

Nice clean x-motor-bracket-spacer_2off piece

x-motor-bracket-spacer_2off . RepRap building sure does seem to inspire a lot of pictures of looking through things.

bed-spring_4off

bed-spring_4off again. Far stronger than my earlier opto spring attempt!

x-carriage-belt-clamp_2off

circuit-board-bracket-m3_4off (4th one was still printing)

Here’s a picture of just the parts from Saturday:

..and here’s all of the parts I’ve printed so far:

All of the parts I've printed for my Mendel RepRap as of 12/19/2009

I got the RepStrap back again today, and tonight I was able to print 9 new pieces (6 unique types). Here are 8 (5 types) of them:

Left: y-idler-bracket_1off, Top: xlr-bracket_1off, Bottom: circuit-board-spacer-m4_2off, TopRight: y-bar-clamp_10off, Right: drive-pulley_3off

(the one at the bottom is a little grey because we’d been printing with black ABS before this and it took a while to clear out).

I decided it was time to bolt the acryllic down to the wood base (previously it was just double-side taped).

The 9th piece is printing now while I should be sleeping. I can see it on my iPhone because I set up my Rovio on the desk to point at the print bed up close. The screenshot is rotated, but here’s a screenshot of the piece that’s currently printing:

You can see the right corner curling up now. Man I really need to make a heated bed. Why is it always that same corner I wonder?

Jeff sleep now.

[Update: Unattended Print Fail (again): (IPhone screenshot of Rovio – low res)

I guess the other corner finally came up too! A heated bed can’t come soon enough.. I need some aluminum…