Vapor smoothing with Acetone

After my failed attempts to smooth PLA with drain cleaner, the acetone vapors work pretty well on ABS. The model is really soft afterwards by that normalizes after some hours

.3mm layerheight, heavenly smoothed

My hub is open

With this this little Marvin I registered my printer on 3D hubs. You can now hitchhike my printer here. I give special discounts for good ideas!

The holy grail of layerheight .1mm

With my new and improved setup I dared testing how .1mm layer height would look like.

Results are mixed, for some reason the model rips itself apart. I also get the feeling that I'm hitting the lower extrusion speed limit if something like it exists.

First I tried normal speeds (30-40mm/s) with otherwise normal settings and furthermore reducing the retraction to 1mm @ 40mm/s.

Then I tried to increase the output by raising the the layer width to 300%, that looked better.

Pushing this even higher to 400% width and 0 retraction made it almost perfect. This is a simple test piece and I haven't managed a complexer piece yet.

Something useful - the stove knob

In one of the earliest videos I saw about 3D printing and Reprap, they mentioned printing knobs (link below).

A rather unexciting idea until you realize how inconvenient it is to fiddle around with metal pins when carefully trying to find the perfect temperature to not burn your pancakes.

Luckily someone like minded already provided a template (Oven knob fully customizable).
This works great, so great indeed that I can put in a custom marker for the prefect pancake setting.

Stability mod part 1

I finally build Masos stability mod (http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:171418).

I replaced the printed arm with 40x20mm rectangular aluminum profile and used a simple L bracket to connect it to the carriage (grey). The wobble is gone now, but the parts were not printed very precise and therefore the carriage doesn't slide very well on the straight rods. I'm waiting for normal linear bearings to arrive.

Same old, same old.

I had hoped once I bought a high-end hotend I'd get good prints, but the Eventorbot frame is still holding me back.
Although much has gotten better such as the solid infill and surfaces

Left .3 and right.2 mm layer height

However I'm still puzzled by the gaps in the walls.

It looks like parts of the wall just curl upwards. However if I see it during printing I cant really see a wobble it just curls up like it doesn't want to stick on the layer beneath. It also is connected to the layer width, which I had down to 120% for different reasons but it appears that 150% reduces the number of gaps visually.

One glimmer of hope is that the gaps appear to be only in places when it wobbles towards the inside, all outward wobble have not gaps.

I can't really imagine that the bed is jumping up and down when the general wobble is only in the x-y direction, but nothing is impossible.

I'm implementing a stability mod at the moment, so we'll see where this leaves us.