ivymike
Mechanical
- Nov 9, 2000
- 5,653
Somebody pointed out to me that there are relatively inexpensive 3D printers on the market these days... and so I went out and bought one. I bought a Printrbot Plus kit (see ) and put the thing together. It took a few evenings. Now I've had the thing up and running for a week and a day, and after daily tweaking, modifying, upgrading, etc.. I'm finally starting to get good-ish parts off of it. It's definitely not a load file & print setup. I'm printing with ABS at the moment, and I hear that PLA will give me less troubles during printing (I always like the pla dishes at Thai restaurants, so that makes sense!) but that it'll be a brittle part in the end...which spoils the fun for me, since I'm not making D&D figurines.
Today I printed out a fan duct and fan mount (single object) to help cool the y-axis stepper motor, which was becoming too hot to touch during printing. The part was about 85mm by 80mm by 70mm, to fit an 80mm fan above and channel airflow around a 42mm motor body. I had to overcome some thermal distortion issues - either the corners would pull off the print table and the part would wobble (turning it into spaghetti as progressive layers printed cattywampus) or the corners would hold but the individual layers would pop apart and curl up. In the end I modified the part to include thin (removable) tabs at each corner to keep the corners stuck better, and staggered notches in the big walls to break up the layers into subsegments which I imagined would reduce the internal tension due to cooling by a fair bit. The thing didn't delaminate nor pop corners, so I guess it worked.
As I type it's printing a bracket to hold a 120mm fan for the extruder motor (I would've used another 80mm, but Best Buy had only two and I needed 3)
Does anyone else have such a gizmo (printer)? (and if so...care to swap pointers?)
Today I printed out a fan duct and fan mount (single object) to help cool the y-axis stepper motor, which was becoming too hot to touch during printing. The part was about 85mm by 80mm by 70mm, to fit an 80mm fan above and channel airflow around a 42mm motor body. I had to overcome some thermal distortion issues - either the corners would pull off the print table and the part would wobble (turning it into spaghetti as progressive layers printed cattywampus) or the corners would hold but the individual layers would pop apart and curl up. In the end I modified the part to include thin (removable) tabs at each corner to keep the corners stuck better, and staggered notches in the big walls to break up the layers into subsegments which I imagined would reduce the internal tension due to cooling by a fair bit. The thing didn't delaminate nor pop corners, so I guess it worked.
As I type it's printing a bracket to hold a 120mm fan for the extruder motor (I would've used another 80mm, but Best Buy had only two and I needed 3)
Does anyone else have such a gizmo (printer)? (and if so...care to swap pointers?)
