Just Another RepRap

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.

Quick post. So Sunday night I had time to take out the supply of PLA (Polylactic acid, a clear biodegradable plastic that won’t warp like ABS) and give it a shot. I didn’t have any of the temperatures down right (temperature was 235C, extruder speed was 210), so it didn’t come out great, but here was my first attempt:

Might get to work on it again later tonight after everyone falls asleep – we’ll see.

Ok, a bunch of things to cover, with a bunch of pics. I’m looking forward to some serious progress after the holiday season is over.

First, there’s definitely a problem with at least batch VII [correction: batch VIII] of MakerBot which prevents you from using 6.9mm of the 100mmx100mm bed. If you look at the failure on the right in this pic:

…you can see at the bottom several loops of the raft where the raft went past the edge of the bed (over by 6.9mm). The top of the raft was 6.9mm in from the edge of the bed.

Ok. So next, here was my impatient attempt to create a heated bed. Rather than ordering a 100mmx100mm 5mm-thick sheet on the Internet like I should have, I went to Home Depot and bought a 12″x12″ sheet that was about 10 times too thin, then cut it into 9 4″x4″ sheets and bolted them all together:

Unfortunately I drilled the center 3 holes a bit off, and I had no magnet to hold it to the MakerBot y axis. Before I wired some nichrome wire up and kapton-taped it down, I put the whole thing on hold because I got access to a supply of PLA that Chris bought. (Still haven’t tried the PLA yet though).

Ok, so next, right before Xmas (when I was hoping to show my brother Jon and my Dad the MakerBot RepStrap), this acrylic retainer ring on the MakerBot broke, threatening to ruin my plans to show it off:

So luckily, when I was at Home Depot recently I bought a 5/8″ Forstner bit which I’d planned to use to make a centering jig for PTFE insulators so I could easily mark the center of the 5/8″ PTFE rods. I cut out a chunk of the MDF that I’m going to use for my Mendel bed, cut out the center hole, drilled the small screw holes and tapped them to M3 size with my newly acquired metric tap & die kit.

Success! Xmas was saved! Of course, it’d have been far better if that part was printed and I already had a printed spare lying around. This was a great illustrating example of why I’m building a Mendel and not just being satisfied with a MakerBot (no offense intended to MakerBot owners!). Printable parts = awesome.

Ok, so next, here were 5 presents I wrapped for Laurie, Emily, Alicia, Cara, and David:

They were the Letter Blocks posted on thingiverse. Here was the one I gave David:

I haven’t allowed myself to print many non-Mendel-piece things, because of my rush to get to a Mendel, but with xmas approaching and the realization that I wouldn’t come anywhere close to having a Mendel ready for another month or so, I decided to print a few things. Here’s my favorite so far:

(the bend in the tree is part of the actual model). I also allowed myself another attempt at printing the whistle, which looked awesome when printed but had enough air holes that it barely functioned at all:

Christmas morning, Laurie surprised me with the final gift of this insanely cool tool chest (that 10 months ago I wouldn’t have cared about, but now I absolutely love/need):

Here’s what a sample of my workbench looks like now, pre-toolchest:

Ok, yet another topic change (got whiplash yet?). While at my parents’ house showing off the MakerBot, we decided to ambitiously try printing Walt Disney’s head (despite the lack of a heated bed). There was insane curling, and a hell of a lot of noise (tip: don’t set up your MakerBot on a dinner table near the TV), but before I aborted the build, it printed this much:

There ya go! More progress next week, I hope. Once again, happy holidays everyone!