More Scrap Art, Gearboxes and PanelMax - #30DoC Days 23 to 26

Greetings,

I have a long....... list of things to print, make and design, most of them take much longer than a day to do, so as a final push for #30DoC I wanted to do some of the quicker things that have been on my list for ages.

Starting with another go at PLA Scrap ART - this time to celebrate my 30 days of creativity in 3D printing.

I was doing a lot of cooking on Day 23 in preparation for a birthday party on the 24th. :) So some PLA ART was a good choice to break up the day.

Day 23 -  

It has some of the scrap I collected during the last 30 days or 3D printing, and was melted in layers in the oven - Here is how to do it -

I used a fully Aluminium picture frame this time.

Staring off with a plate of translucent red (the only failure from my number counting day) and some clear pla from failed ball of stars experiments. Let that melt for 10 minutes at 210 Degrees C on a baking tray.

Add more layers of scrap plastic - most of this was from the Half a ball of stars test, melt again.

Print a quick and rough logo. Add various spare parts likethe planetary gears (see below) and cook for another 8mins.

Done.

Day 24 - I Did nothing to do with RepRap or3D printing  :)

Day 25 - Was finally time to make up an LCD screen for my Max

PanelMax interface - I bought the parts a while ago and had not found the time to make it up. It's not quite up and running just yet, as I was missing a connector and suitable Pot for the contrast.

I'm putting the LCD and SDRAMPS connections to just one dual row 0.1" box header connector, it made wiring very easy and connection to RAMPS 1.4 almost foolproof.

It's going to be used with my MiniMax printer as a stand-alone system for portable printing.

Tommyc has an excellent Blog post about it here and the files are upon thingiverse here, best of all it works with Marlin firmware.

Think3DPrint3D also have a post on a version of the Panelmax here
I'll update when it's all working with my printer.

Day 26 was all about the awesome new RepRap challenge, set this week by Greg Frost.
It was the turn of the Tiny Planetary Gears set by aubenc.


I had not tried to print this before, so gave it a go using Slic3r V0.8.3.
I had a few issues with the tiny planet gears getting in-filled but resolved that and managed to get some sets printed out.

Pearlescent White for the basic two gear set, all printed well apart from my filled in planets, don't worry I'll do those again later separably.

A nice Buttercream expansion set to make it a 4 stage gearbox.


The sets were printing very quickly and I had two printers doing them, so I thought, why not make the bolts much longer and go for some more stages.

So I made some much longer bolts in Sketchup from the originals. Just over 86mm tall.

They printed fine on their own, so now I just needed more sets of gears - 

Everything fitted together so perfectly.

It ended up as a Six stage gear-set, the longer bolts are up on Thingiverse here as a derivative.

I'm delighted with how it came out, and how well it works, it's a really great design and goes together very well indeed. it's nice to watch the motion, each planet is a different colour so you can see them orbit around the centre shaft. After about 4 stages it's almost impossible to see them turning, but they do move,just very slowly indeed.

Just one more thing before I go - 


I was reading the RepRap Forum while the gear-sets were printing and Enlightx mentioned some experiments with adding primers to heated beds for PLA, I liked the idea of PVA so I tried it out.

I used a 1:8 mix of very low-grade PVA glue and water so it was very thin, brush it onto a heated bed and it dries in less and 1 minute.

I tried it out on two different printers at the same time, one was printing a Green gear set, I raised the starting layer by 0.1mm and it stuck down really well, no problems in the print and they removed with a little force when cold. I had very nice printed parts with no bottom lip at all, that was the best gear-set I printed.

The other printer was set at 0.2mm higher than I would normally print a 0.3mm layered print. This means the first layer of filament is barely touching the heated bed, this would normally result in the print becoming detached or warping very badly. That was my way to test if it was better or worse than mirror-glass as a print surface.

The Print completed and I was very surprised to see not a single bit of warp or the parts detached from the bed. When I turned the part over you can clearly see how little was attached to the PVA primed Mirror-glass surface.

This Extruder body is 100mm wide and about 80mm high, I have has slight warp with it before even when really squashing down the first layer, so I was amazed how well this worked.

I need to print some more things, but at the moment thinned PVA applied to the heated bed looks like a very good idea. Thanks for the discovery Enlightx!


I printed three sets of parts on this PVA treated heat-bed, almost all of the PVA stays on the glass, and if you need to touch it up, when you apply more it all melts and re-forms into a new smooth layer. It's looking like a  very nice surface to print PLA onto. Give it a try if you can.

As always, thanks for reading, and let me know what you think and how 3D printing is going for you.


I have also noticed a significant increase in visitors from Japan to the Blog over the last few weeks, so if you are reading in Japan, Konnichiwa :) do leave a comment and let us know how you are doing.

Rich.


P.S. - And before I forget, Slic3r V0.8.4 is OUT, and it now does a perfect job of printing the gear-set above without the odd infilling of the planets I was experiencing with V0.8.3. It also has lots of other upgrades and changes making this one a must upgrade for anyone using the Slic3r, go get it now, it's great!

Ball joints, Fans, RPi, Hearts and fairy dust - #30DoC Days 19 to 22

Hello, and I hope you are having a good day? Here is an update of my RepRap adventures over the last few evenings -

For #30DoC - Day 19 I printed the Impossible Sphere for the weekly RepRap competition (see last post)-

Here is another one at 0.2mm layers - using the SCAD script richgain posted a few days ago -

I have not yet tried Greg's high resolution version, but it's on my list.

Day 20 was a Raspberry Super Pi Case - On thingiverse Here - It's a jazzed up version of the great case by HansH with added mounting ears and SD card support, light guides, etc.

Here it is in 'Special Edition' Gold and Glow in the Dark!

I also have my Printer running from my Raspberry Pi, with The Arduino, as it still does an ideal job due to the limited I/O on the RPi, I will do a separate post on setting up the RPi with Pronterface for RepRap printing. The Raspberry Pi is my excuse to finally learn more about Linux, so maybe you can give me some pointers along the way. There is also an active post in the RepRap forums on RPi, Pronterface and RepRap If you want to join in the development ideas with Raspberry Pi and RepRap.

Day 21 was an attempt to make a direct-able fan mount for MendelMax (and any other printer) - I have been using fans on and off for about the past year when printing in PLA, I'm really keen to understand how fans help with the build process, so in an attempt to learn more I wanted a mount I could direct airflow across, along, and even cyclone around my printed objects.

I used the ball joints from the great Fully printable PCB Vice by Sneakypoo as a starting point.

I love the Screw and threaded ball joint, it works perfectly.

The idea was to have it mount on the MendelMax 20mm Aluminium frame - but you attach it to any surface or bars with ty-wraps.

Above is the Vertical mounted fan.

As the ball joint can't quite do all angles, I have also done a Horizontal mount with M3 nut-trap (above), but not had time to test it yet, looks like it fits the 80mm fan just fine.

I have not yet had a chance to fit them to the MendelMax quite yet, but I'll keep you updated how well they work.

And for speed control I'm using a standard PC fan controller as they are just a few pounds, and give me individual control of four PC fans, it was easier to buy one than make up my own.
It also has one input power feed so you could still control it from the RAMPS Fan output but with the bonus of having individual power levels for all four fans.

The Universal 80mm Fan mount files are up on Thingiverse Here - 

For Day 22 we needed some urgent printed gifts for my daughters birthday party gift bags - after a bit of discussion and searching Thingiverse we decided on a secret box to store precious things or fairy-dust in, magic!

I first thought of the stratasys demo pot but that didn't quite hit mark -

Then we discovered the many twisted Boxed by Wizard23 and decided a Heart box would be great, check them out, they are all fantastic and they fitted together perfectly.

I needed to print 15 of them - here is a work in progress action shot -

Getting the size just right, they are very quick to print.

Printed in perfectly ideal colours from Faberdashery Buttercream and Cherry blossom pink - that reminds me, if you want a filament that sticks really well to your heated bed, I have yet to find a type or colour that sticks as well as Buttercream, from my experience with it, it's close to warp-proof.

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I have also just got my new extruder prototype assembled, and it works! with a simple first test - I just need to change the design a little as it's almost impossible to assemble at the moment. - More on that next week.
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Thanks for reading, more soon.

Cheers,

Rich.