Just Another RepRap

My latest trend is to identify the easy-to-print pieces and get them out of the way, so I can worry about complex parts later (and address those either via slower printing and a hotter raft, or an eventual heated bed, or by printing those with PLA). So Friday night I churned out 11 parts:

Friday

Lots of parts.

I tried at least one other piece but without immediate success, since it’s one of the (many?) pieces whose default rotation is crazy.

This unusable piece basically printed upside down:

Went to bed, got like an hour of sleep, and took Cara to baby gym class. That means it had become Saturday.

Saturday

Printed out a bunch more parts today. I’m running out of “easy” parts. I think I’ve now completed 53 pieces.

Here’s a picture of just the parts from Saturday:

..and here’s all of the parts I’ve printed so far:

I got the RepStrap back again today, and tonight I was able to print 9 new pieces (6 unique types). Here are 8 (5 types) of them:

(the one at the bottom is a little grey because we’d been printing with black ABS before this and it took a while to clear out).

I decided it was time to bolt the acryllic down to the wood base (previously it was just double-side taped).

The 9th piece is printing now while I should be sleeping. I can see it on my iPhone because I set up my Rovio on the desk to point at the print bed up close. The screenshot is rotated, but here’s a screenshot of the piece that’s currently printing:

You can see the right corner curling up now. Man I really need to make a heated bed. Why is it always that same corner I wonder?

Jeff sleep now.

[Update: Unattended Print Fail (again): (IPhone screenshot of Rovio – low res)

I guess the other corner finally came up too! A heated bed can’t come soon enough.. I need some aluminum…

So I’m without the RepStrap until Thursday or Friday, and have time to post to the blog while waiting for pizza. 🙂 This blog post will mainly be pics and video.

First, Saturday was successful in that I printed several parts for my Mendel RepRap. Some pictures of success:

There were also less-than-successful prints. Here was one I was particularly sad about, because it was looking so good before it died (and broke the entire RepStrap, yet again). I’d rotated it in Blender first to try printing it on its back:

Here’s a pic of all of the parts I currently have printed for Mendel (printed Friday/Saturday):

And another view of that “spring” piece, which didn’t print too well but will probably work:

Video of those pieces, and of some of the recent failures:

Now, a suggestion about unattended printing.. Don’t rely on a Rovio that’s on the floor to see if your 3D printer is merely still moving. Once it’s done, you might see something like this:

And finally, you know you’ve been thinking about RepRap too much when you go to a football game, see this, and think about a RepRap extruder: