PLA for the win!!! Successful Mendel Extruder Piece

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.