Creuzer – Page 46 – Random things Creuzer

I tried making a unique little box I saw on ThingiVerse

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:413

I am not really all that happy with it. the inside was pretty stringy and infact on the lid, when I tried to remove the stringyness I think the entire inside bit got pulled out.

Am I still running too hot? I think the base is a bit gloopier than the upper layers and I had the printer 'sitting' at 185 while I was loading the next file.

Print Notes
PLA 3mm natural
extrusion 175C 30mm/s parims 60mm/s infill
retraction 1mm 20mm/s
bed 60C
slic3r 0.7 pronterface 0.7e sprinter

In album

View this post on Google+

My 2nd print was a stand for my mom's Kindle Fire

I wanted to show them the printer and how it could actually be useful.

http://www.thingiverse.com/derivative:23478

Granted, 5 minutes in the wood shop would have made something just as functional as opposed to over an hour to print this out.

It took me 4 tries before I got the first layer right. My print bed is dished as I don't have a glass surface yet and I was having a hard time finding a Z enstop location that worked across the print area.

Print Notes
PLA 3mm natural
extrusion 185C 30mm/s parims 60mm/s infill
retraction 1mm 30mm/s
bed 60C
slic3r 0.7 pronterface 0.7e sprinter

It was recommended that I drop my extrusion temp by about 10 degrees and the retraction rate by 10mm/s.

In album

Printing a 2 part item for my 2nd print. This is about 2/3rds of the way completed.

The finished parts.

The dark lines in the print are from me marking the filament with a sharpie so I could gauge feed rate.

The stand works! Probably would look nicer in black PLA, but all I have is natural at the moment.

View this post on Google+

Hello World 3d style

My printer's first print is a raised letter version of a programmer's first program. Display "Hello World".

Print Notes
PLA 3mm natural
extrusion 185C 30mm/s parims 60mm/s infill
retraction 1mm 30mm/s
bed 60C
slic3r 0.7 pronterface 0.7e sprinter

In album

View this post on Google+

Working on my 3d printer provided some interesting challenges

I got it assembled within 48 hours of receiving it. Than the fun started …

I had plugged all the motors backwords. This means that when I told the printer to move one way it went backwards. A simple fix. More annoyingly only 3 of the 4 sets ran well. Some trouble shooting narrowed it down to a flakey motor control module.

I contacted makergear on IRC support channel about it and we went through some quick steps and verified the module is bad. At 1 am. They sent out a new one the next morning. Also, they helped me find a local person who happened to have a spare one he'd sell me. How is that for costomer service? A+ service in my book.

I went out to the local guy and picked up a good motor module. I also took a look at his machine. Very nice! I could see some of the little tweaks on my kit that are even nicer than his machine: like all stainless hardware.

I got home and plugged the module in and it worked! While I had the polulu pulled, I switched all my microstepping from 1/8th to 1/16th as the machine seemed to want to travel twice the distance I asked it to.

The other big problem I had was with the temperature sensor. Every bit tested ok, but it just wouldn't work. Easily an hour of cussing out the connectors I figured out I had been trying to put the inserts into the wrong parts. Once I sorted that out, it was easy to make it work right.

The last issue is that the print bed isn't perfectly flat. I grabbed a piece of glass I had but ended up dropping it and shattering it.

Once I got everything put together, I tried to print. I got a couple of loops around and things started to get wonky. Turns out, I needed to turn down the power after changing the microstepping rate which I had failed to do. This caused an extruder meltdown as the motor was running how and melted the plastic from the gear to the nozzle. It took me several hours to fix this.

In album

Assembled control board. I added the heat sinks to the polulul motor control boards right after this photo was taken.

My extruder assembly tore appart trying to get it cleared and fixed.

The set screw was seized up and wasn’t correctly seated on the keyway. So I had to make a shim to get the gear to stay tight onto the motor shaft.

Extruder motor and the hot end where the only bits that weren’t affected by the meltdown. Everything else just went stupid on me.

Assembled RepRap ready to start to test.

Heat curing the ceramic on the heater element for the hot end. My ancient AT power supply worked great for this.

My first attempt to print. It failed catastrophically.

Plastic is sheared off in the extruder body and I had to drill it out to remove it.

View this post on Google+

My First day of building my MakerGear RepRap Prusa Mendel was a blast! I told work…

My First day of building my MakerGear RepRap Prusa Mendel was a blast! I told work that I was going to be on MakeCation when it arrived so I was able to stay up late. It took me a while to clean up the LaBOREtory so I can assemble the kit, but once I got going I was chugging along!

I printed out the 'main' instructions on paper and had the 'delta' instructions up on screen and went through and highlighted the step numbers on the main instructions sheets that I needed to reference the alternate instructions. This way I didn't skip any important changes.

The kit owner was on IIRC and answered a couple of trivial questions. I made notes so I can compile all my questions and the right answers and feed them back to get an instruction update for the next person that goes through the process.

At 1 am, I did have a stumper of a question – which was I grabbed the wrong bag of parts and they didn't fit where I was trying to put them. I figured it was a good time to quit at that point.

I have a video at http://youtu.be/8ADK50T489A

In album