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…

So I’m without the RepStrap until Thursday or Friday, and have time to post to the blog while waiting for pizza. This blog post will mainly be pics and video.

First, Saturday was successful in that I printed several parts for my Mendel RepRap. Some pictures of success:

z-leadscrew-base-bar-clamp_2off

z-axis-opto-spring_1off. I need to try printing this on its side.

z-opto-bracket_1off

z-bar-top-clamp_4off

There were also less-than-successful prints. Here was one I was particularly sad about, because it was looking so good before it died (and broke the entire RepStrap, yet again). I’d rotated it in Blender first to try printing it on its back:

pinch-wheel-bracket-NEMA17_604-bearing_1off, rotated to print on its back

Here’s a pic of all of the parts I currently have printed for Mendel (printed Friday/Saturday):

Mendel Parts So Far

And another view of that “spring” piece, which didn’t print too well but will probably work:

Video of those pieces, and of some of the recent failures:

Now, a suggestion about unattended printing.. Don’t rely on a Rovio that’s on the floor to see if your 3D printer is merely still moving. Once it’s done, you might see something like this:

And finally, you know you’ve been thinking about RepRap too much when you go to a football game, see this, and think about a RepRap extruder:

Not a RepRap extruder

It’s Printing Day! Currently I’m looking at 5 completed frame-vertex pieces (which each take 1.5 hours to print on the MakerBot I’m using), and I’m currently printing the 6th and last required instance of that piece. I’m hoping to print out enough of the pieces from the first steps of assembly that I’ll actually be able to start assembling part of the frame before long – but I don’t want to get my hopes up.

Here’s a pic of the 5 completes pieces:

Five completed vertex-frame pieces. The one on the left was my first Mendel part. The one on the right hasn't had the raft cleaned off yet; I should be doing that now, but instead I'm blogging.

One thing that I always I’m always fascinated by and enjoy is the list of strange “side-game” routines that you discover when doing a project. When I was designed and built the Lego Halo 3 Foundry Forge Kit (a large Lego model of the video game Halo, that lets you design maps), I purchased pieces directly from LEGO. But when I built my next large kit (and decided to buy my bricks elsewhere), the unexpected side game I discovered was finding where to purchase what parts I needed (412 of the 4×4 blue plates from here, 1240 grey 1×1 bricks from here, etc). I had completely overlooked the detail that would go into acquiring parts. I describe the feeling as if I were an old woman in a supermarket shopping for good cuts of meat, looking for a good bargain, weighing pricing options, etc. This store has these bricks that I need but not those, this other store has more things but charges and arm and a leg for shipping, etc. That same side-game existed for my Mendel parts purchasing as well, but that’s not the new side-game I discovered today.

No, today, I discovered another unexpected side-game in building myself a Mendel: scheduling which parts to print, and when. By my count there are around 106 different parts I need to print out, some taking 2.5 hours to print, others reportedly taking 11 minutes. I’ve calculated that it should take sixty solid hours of printing time to print out these pieces (don’t quote me on the accuracy of that estimate – it’s based on other people’s documents, me throwing them into a simple spreadsheet, etc).

Which to do first? Print out the most time-expensive pieces first and get them out of the way? Well hold on.. Certain pieces make sense to print at certain times of the day, it would seem (at least for me – I’m married and have four kids). If I have a reliable piece that always prints well that takes an hour and a half long to print, maybe I should save that for when it’s time to watch a movie with the family. When I finally get some time that everyone else is either out of the house or asleep, maybe that’s a good time to do a bunch of the 11-minute pieces.

..but then there’s the order you want them in.. I’d love to actually start assembling the frame, if only to give me a reason to bother cutting down the threaded rod to size, etc. But that requires certain pieces. So I’d want to print those first, right?

That’s the game going through my head – coming up with the best strategy I can. Add to that the fact that I’m away tomorrow, so I’m handing the RepStrap (MakerBot) to Chris so he can have it for a week, and I now have a time crunch for today! Given a set amount of time today to print, which parts make the most sense, etc?

I decided to print the 6th frame-vertex piece now (even though I’m using up one of those reliably-prints-over-1.5-hour pieces that would print easily during a movie) so that I can use the 1.5 hours to install more software and learn how to rotate some pieces around before printing, etc (except that I’m using that time to blog now). Oh, and I have David here (who’s been very kind to sleep through most of the past piece).

More pics as the day goes on.

Woohoo!!! After days of anguish over failed prints of various Mendel pieces (and broken extruders, and broken thermistors), I’ve finally printed my first successful piece of my Mendel RepRap (printed on the MakerBot RepStrap, which I just fixed). This piece is “frame-vertex_6off”. I completed it sometime after 4am on December 11, 2009 (my brother Jon’s birthday.. Happy Birthday!). So happy. Awesome.

The build took 1 hour and 28 minutes to complete. Two days ago I’d tightened all of the belt tensioners and turned the Y pot up 1/4 turn, but never got to test it out because of the heater barrel problem. That night I built a new PTFE insulator, screwed it on the heater barrel, and in the process damaged the thermistor, causing the temperature to constantly rise when the machine was turned on. Tonight I replaced the thermistor, taped up the extruder again, and then tried printing a standard test part with no success (the part bent up, causing the nozzle to hit it and knock everything all over the place). So I took off all of the double-sided scotch tape that I’d put on the acrylic bed and replaced it with new double sided tape. That held everything down perfectly. Once the raft was laid out without flaw, I knew I had a chance.

I actually fell asleep a bit of the way through the build, then woke to see it had completed the teardrop holes on the side.

Here are pictures I took throughout the process, showing it progress. Too tired for captions now, maybe later:

The one thing I was a bit surprised by was that after the entirely successful build, the nozzle then plunged into the piece, which left the tiny brown mark you can see in one of the photos. Was this somehow deliberate, like “tie off the last bit of plastic so it doesn’t unravel?”. I can’t remember if I stopped it or if it stopped on its own. But anyway, the piece is great!

Oh, and just one more time… Happy Birthday, Brother Jonathan!

Something’s wrong here, and I’m not sure what it is. There are a bunch of things it could be, and I’m frustrated.

Tonight, again, I watched the MakerBot plastruder push the heater barrel right out of another PTFE insulator.. First it had extruded a small amount, then the entire barrel pushed out. I should create a gallery of PTFE insulators..

I was just ready to print out the test piece that I’d read about for months. I had just tightened up all of the belts, and I was convinced everything was going to work great.

Unfortunately, the barrel is now caked in this seemingly unremovable glaze that’s practically filled the grooves to the point where it seems smooth, which is why it’s not getting a grip anymore. Actually, I don’t know that. I suspect the thermistor is giving inaccurate results, but I’m not sure which way. When I saw it push out, I’d told it to be at 220C. If it was actually colder than that, the plastic would have been tougher to push through the nozzle so the motor would have pushed the heater barrel out (I DID see it extrude some through the barrel, so at least some of it melted). Or it could be way hotter than that, and have affected the PTFE. I don’t know.

I’m burnt for a while. This is extremely frustrating. The extruder needs to be strong as steel, and there needs to be some ability to detect when we’re pushing waaay harder than we should need to, so firmware can stop the motor before it tears the extruder apart. I’m tempted to use some of my Mendel supply of brass rod and PTFE rod to create another extruder from scratch (and use kaptan tape instead of fire cement, since that’s what the MakerBot’s extruder uses), but then I also have to use more nicrome wire, which I don’t have too much of. Agh.

Frustrated. Hulk mad. RepStrap no work.

[Update: Before giving up for the night, I clamped the existing heater barrel down in a vice, and successfully ran an M6 die from my new metric tap & die kit along the barrel, completely cutting away all of that awful glaze. Later I plan to cut off another piece of PTFE, drill it on both sides, use the M6 tap, and rebuild the insulator again. I do not plan to turn anything on though until I can find our meat thermometer, borrow one from a friend, or buy one at the store, so I can see what temperature the barrel actually is when I tell it to go to 220C.]