Fun with t-glase

[itsmoked]

Hi,

[URL unfurl="true"]http://taulman3d.com/t-glase-features.html[/url]

I'm using t-glase to try to built a small water-tight structure that can be looked thru with an IR sensor. For starters it's not water clear as advertized, as you end up with the 'polar-bear syndrome' where while the hair is clear the bear looks white due entirely to diffraction, scatter, and reflection. It's suggested that painting the printed article with epoxy fills in all the surface radii caused by the many cylindrical strands of the extrusions.

While working thru all this I stuck the article under my microscope and was shocked to see all the tiny gaps everywhere! I was planning on this thing holding water pressure but from the looks of it it would leak like some sort of high precision sieve.

What does one change in the run-parameters to cause more... mashing together of the individual print passes. I think this would greatly help with the see-thru clarity with regards to less light passing thru one strand going airborne and entering the next causing huge angular diffractions.

Keith Cress
kcress -

http://www.flaminsystems.com

 

[JNieman]

There's not a whole lot of very complicated things going on in these machines. It's squirting molten plastic on a plane. What I would do is try a few experiments after changing one of two variables. One is to decrease the layer thickness without decreasing the feedrate. Or just slow down the extruder feed rate instead. Either way, it should force the material to flow better. However your feature sizes may change. Holes may tighten up as the plastic is pushed laterally, further than before.

Such is the nature of filament extruders but it can be mitigated. You might want to look into that epoxy. I personally don't spend much time experimenting with what the machine can do. Once I hit the geometric sweet spot where it's printing to a predictable size based upon my model, I prefer to leave that be. If I require something beyond the material performance, I'll look at post-processing rather than machine-tinkering. I don't have much faith in a 3d printer of this type being able to do multiple things perfectly at the same time.

 

[itsmoked]

Thanks J. I slowed it way down and it indeed helped join the threads together better. Sadly it didn't help with the clarity much at all.

I also considered using a soluble filament to print a mold that I could then use for an epoxy casting instead. Trouble is I'm trying to do this for sodium hypochlorite which no epoxies seem to work with. I guess I'll have to go with PVC rod and just machine what I need. Dang.

Keith Cress
kcress -

http://www.flaminsystems.com