Summerbreak - Back in September

We will be leaving for the summer now and be back in September bigger and better and with more actually printed stuff. Feel free to leave us your wishes and suggestions for topics and designs we should cover here in future.

Print new Worlds

What is a useful 3D printed thing?

One of the goals of this blog is getting away from this:

 "Oh let me 3D scan your face and print a 3cm bust - yay 3D printing is so innovative!" 

But is it really useful? and does it justify investing in a printer yourself? Maybe something in the middle between the really gimmicky stuff and a custom solution requiring experts and hundreds of dollars.

Last year when was trying to find a good way to place the furniture in my room I could have used something like this.



The idea:

1st successful ghost print

I´m sitting here without filament which is frustrating but gives me time to check out all details.

For example: I discussed the average temperature the stepper motors should be running in the eventorbot forum and it turns out they are supposed to run at 50-80C!

Also I was worried because there had been videos of other peoples builds in which the printer was jerking around and it looked like it would fall apart any moment.

At the moment I loaded and sliced this calibration cube and the printer behaves just fine. It relatively loud but the whole frame behaves very stable.

We have lift off!

After a little scare with the wrong polarity at the power supply switch, the printer is now moving!

All endstop switches work, the extruder heats up correctly, the glue holding the resistor doesn't start to burn, the extruder extrudes in both directions and the motors home correctly.

Frameworks: done

That looks like some proper welding!

We now have 2 tack welds per side, very solid looking.

The basics - Hardware and parts

When talking about the home 3D printer I mainly referring to reprap style printers. What that is I explain in the next part. For now the we just need to know that it stands for "replicating rapid prototyper". These machines are either bought as a kits for self assembly, as whole from certain manufactures or the parts are sourced by oneself again for self assembly. Prices range from very basic models ~300$ to 3000$ for pre assembled brand products.

The main parts are:

The basics (series)

I learned about 3D printing one year ago and it took its time till I made the decision to buy one myself and now I´m at least "google-smart" enough to ask the right questions in the right forums :)
So this will be my attempt to connect all relevant parts of 3D printing in a practically short way and continually update it to give a good impression of what home 3D printing can do.

Topics:

What would you like to see?

We were wondering what people might like to see on this Blog. We have some more ideas and we also want to get a Youtube channel going where we show the production and application of the stuff we design, but what would you like to see?

3D printing development and news?
Arts and crafts?
Design and application?

Z-Axis looking good

Everything starts to fit in its place.

I fixed the coupling from the motor to the threaded rod with electrical tape in spite someone mentioning that it could melt. If the motor should get so hot that even the coupling heats up we have a whole new range of problems.
Also someone mentioned that the whole weight of the printbed rests on the coupling and it is actually quite heavy. Maybe we´ll find a way connect carriage rods to the frame .

Finally something useful

This a first design of a chain-guard. In bike stores they cost around 20€ and we to produce them at home for 2-3€

Update: I finally debugged the model for slicing. A 30 cm long version would be around 110g of ABS plastic which would cost ~2.10€ at 20€/kg.

Lets start scribbling

Years ago I saw a vase brake and it landed almost upright but in a weird angle and would´t fall over. This somehow reminded me of an unexploded bomb. 

It would be an interesting contrast to see some flowers in there.

 

Firmware puzzles

I managed to get the modified Sprinter firmware running. I´m a bit dispointed the "it doesn´t blink" like the standard Arduino kits but I think but at least it does the serious printer work!

Painting as pastime

As predicted painting myself turns out to be cheaper and finishing the gantries is a nice pastime while waiting on the frame. I´m itching for the first opportunity to assemble the frame!