Nativity

After this past Christmas my wife wanted to add a Nativity Scene.  So now and then after work I slowly worked on providing the starts of that for Christmas 2015.  After searching the thingiverse I found a couple of highly detailed models that someone had 3d scanned.  I thought these would be perfect to try!

 The first item I went for was "King 1" which is thing:591213 this print had no major overhangs for my printer to handle.  Although the arm has a large opening I had no problem in this area. The chin also printed well since I print with inner most loop first (to provide something for overhangs to try to grab.

 King 1 Back Side

Now naturally you would think I went to King 2 next.  Due to extreme overhangs I decided to go with King 3. King 3 which is thing:591219 also was a straight forward print.  The chin was kind of a big overhang and I have 1 strand of droop.

 King 3 Right

King 3 Left

 Still due to the extreme overhangs of King 2 I decided to do Mary and Jesus next. Thing:591195 has some great detail in my opinion. I was worried the baby would be too small but he came out just fine.

 Mary Front View

 Mary Back View

Mary Side View

Now after these three were complete it was time to finally try King 2.  Now with my printer not having support capability I knew there was no way for this file to print directly. I used a program called "netfabb Basic" to help slice up the model into pcs. I did not pay for the full version and only used the trial version. This allowed me to insert cut planes into the model and remove parts I didnt want. 

I ended up slicing him 3 ways. Once just above the elbows made him have a top and bottom. This allowed me to print the bottom section.  Although the elbows were still present in the slice it just printed a giant blob that I later easily removed. 

The second slice was a little creative.  I took the bottom of the model and sliced away the body and as much of the kings gift as I could leaving his elbows behind. I then flipped the model up side down so his elbows would come out of the print bed. This left just the tip of the gift floating in mid air. The part in mid air just created another blob that was just pulled off. 

The final section was just the top half from the first slice.  Once all three sections were printed I "glued" them together with acetone. I must say it came out way better than anticipated.

 If you look very carefully you can see the split plane just below his armpits.

King 2 front side

 Now time to put them  all together in one view :)

It is very important to note that the original file import makes King 1 a 577mm tall model!!!! Unless you have a huge 3d printer good luck.  In Kisslicer I scaled all the models down to 9% of their original size!!! This may have helped greatly with some of the overhang issues since the overhangs are dramatically reduced.

I hope the publisher of the set puts up more of the models now that he sees how they print!

I can also say that in the past few months I have been working ALOT on one other 3d print project with about 30 different iterations so far.  Unfortunately I will not be sharing that item on here or the thingiverse. It is an item related to one of my other hobbies that is a known problem that has no definitive solution, but with the device I am creating I may be able to capture a niche market.  That does relate to lack of posts since the printer fix :)

Africa!

So this is why I couldn't make an update post right away mid November.  My first items once I calibrated was I decided to print Africa!  My sister-in-law is in Africa for the Peace Corps and I wanted to send her something special in our Christmas care package.  I found this item Thing 11159 which was a puzzle of Africa! I thought what a perfect item!  It was crunch time and I had to get this printed to send out our package ASAP since the shipping time is pretty long.

 Well I cant really rotate the image but here ya go! I happen to have 4 colors of filament, and 4 is all you need to have no 2 colors touch each other!!!! On some of the big countries I aborted the printed when 1-2 layers were left. This was to conserve plastic and time. 

 

Southern Portion 

 

Eastern Portion

 

Western Portion

 

 Hint Key

I had to add Gambia which can be found here 

4hrs a night for 4 days in a row! Basically 1 color a night. I cannot believe the quality of these prints. The printer is working perfectly now!  The only thing that could have made this better was if I was able to palletize with my printer so that I can load a bunch of countries for one color at one time. That way I wouldn't have to babysit it. Some of the small countries were only 2-3 minutes.

Elephant

I have been so extremely busy at work lately that I decided I needed to print something fun to take a moment and relax. I decided that I would print the featured thing on the thingiverse which was an elephant that is printed all at once but has 2 movable pairs of legs. Elephant . This was a great print. After it got started I decided to walk away for a while since it was going to be a few hours. When I came back this is what I saw. The print had "completed" and I was left with an open shell!

I was a little frustrated after having all that time pass and this was the end result. I then took a look at the Gcode file and sure enough it stopped at a height a few mm shorter than what it was supposed to be. I tried slicing the file a few more times and still ended up with the same/similar gcode file. What was going on?

I wasnt going to give up so I left the elephant attached to the print bed while I figured out a plan. My soft stops for the printer are set at twice the height of the print so that couldnt be the issue. There was just something wrong with the gcode. I never did find out the exact cause but I eventually got it to slice with the full length in the file. I then opened the gcode file for some editing. 

I measured the height of my print by stepping the nozzle up and down in pronterface until it just touched off the top of the print. I then took the gcode file and deleted all the lines of code (except the opening settings at the start of the file) up to the height that I touched off at. I then added a line of code to the starting line that made it move up to height higher than the elephant before it would move to the first print point on the file. 

After a few times of trial and error and adding and deleting sections of code to hone in on the correct height I was able to finish the print!

So you will notice the elephant is printed laying down. The legs are then able to be stood up due to the way they nest in the print. You can tell where it had messed up because the seem was shifted a little forward but it still finished the print. 

You'll notice how crappy my trunk looks. This is because of a known issue with my printer that I need to fix. There is a terrible amount of backlash in my extrusion gear. When it does a "suck" maneuver in the code the gear turns backwards. It then takes a few mm of material before the gear catches and starts extruding again. 

Time to print some new extrusion gears!

Catch Up Time! Dead hot end :(

Ok so I know I have had posts like this in the past. Apologizing for not posting anything in a long time. Well now that fall/winter has set in I will definitely have more time. This summer with the new house and a new kitten was so crazy! Awesome though.

I did make one update to the printer, to allow more power to the heat bed, I added an old laptop power supply to run my gen 6 electronics and stepper motors.

Ok so about the only notable thing that I have made since moving was a toy for the cat.  He has been so playful and constantly attacks our ankles so I decided to make him a toy to add to his never ending pile of things to play with.

Thing 17239 Is what I decided to go with. I decided to scale it down a little from the original size. I don't remember what I scaled it as. All I know is Wronny loved it! The first picture is the print before I cleaned it up a little.

Action Shot. He chased it around for a very long time that day!

Another action shot. 

If I print this again I will not scale it down. He knocked it down the basement stairs a few too many times and it busted open. If it had been at full scale it probably would have been stronger. 

So this brings me to today, we were checking out the new 3d print shop in town and my wife saw a few things she liked. So I decided I would make something similar since it was a fairly simple Thing 35246 Just a simple snowflake vase (print the item with 0% infill) I started printing and things were going great. About 1/4 of the way through the print I glanced over and saw it was messing up big time! I quickly looked at pronterface and it was saying something like "Cold Extrusion Prevented". My hot end has bit the dust. It stopped keeping heat and was dropping fast. It now no longer works. ARG. Going to have to do some fixing I guess. 

Here is the print as far as it made it. I will just turn it into a Christmas Ornament to hang on the tree since it didn't finish. 

If you have any ideas how to get my hot end going again please let me know!!!!

Music to my ears

I was looking for something cool to print and when I went to the thingiverse I came across the price winners of their recent competition they held. I really like the customizable music box so I decided to print it. Thingiverse thing 53235 the music cylinder it comes programmed with is just a test reel. It just has some simple chords and a run. I didnt print the cylinder because of the waste of plastic (3meters at 10% fill!).

Here you can see the main box, the gears, handle, and shaft. The box was about 3 metes of plastic and 3.5 hours of print time, the other items were small amounts of plastic and easily under 20 minutes each. 

I noticed that Frere Jacques had been designed. Thing 59242. I printed this out and it sounds pretty cool! 

Just so you have an idea, this is what 10% fill looks like. This is to conserve plastic and not print a completely solid core. It saves tons on material and time. Speaking of time....

This is a time lapse video of the cylinder being printed. It was a 2.5hr print! The webcam is held using my item Thing 52533. If you want to hear what the song sounds like here is a video by the creator of the music box. You have to press it against a box for it to sound right. Mine sounds almost the same as the video so you get the idea. 

I wanted to make a happy birthday cylinder for my birthday next week. You can listen to it on youtube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_c3p24RRtQ

Pen

Well just a quick post. I wanted to make something for my wife on the printer since it has been a little while. Thing 45576 is what I decided to go with. It is a customizable pen!

Once it is printed you just insert a pen insert from a cheap pen like a hotel pen. She took it to work as her pen to give people when they want to borrow one. That way she knows she gets it back :)

Warping and sticking in Geneva

So I will start by saying after I did the recent tape job (which looks great) I have been having some major issues with warping/curling. I dont know if this is because of the weather or the fact that the apt is a little cold but it has been very annoying.

For those of you who dont know what warping is read this: When printing the plastic it will cool down and shrink. On larger prints the lower layers are cool by time the next layers print. As the above layer cools it pulls the part towards the center as it shrinks. This will cause the corners of the print to pop of the bed and sometimes even cause the entire print to fall off.

 I wanted to try a few things to see if I could stop the curling. The far left print you can see how much the corners came up by time it was done. This was just plane printing on my clean surface. Way more curling than ever before  while printing on my ceramic. 

The Middle was a trial using water and glue mixture. The water evaporated off the bed and left a thin film of glue. This did help a lot as you see but still not perfect. Next I tried some acetone based (small % though) nail polish remover. This did help still but I wasn't 100% happy with the results.

I went to amazon.com and purchased a small 4 oz bottle of 100% acetone to dissolve some ABS in. After waiting a week for it to come in I took a sauce jar and put in 2 ounces of the acetone and a few scrap parts. When I woke up in the morning the parts were completely gone! This is ABS juice that is becoming a more common practice. I know a smaller jar would help contain the fumes but this is all I had for now. 

Now that I had the abs juice I applied some to the print bed with a q-tip and printed the next part I needed. Boy did I have fun trying to get this off! I tried letting it cool and still couldnt get it off. Next I tried the freezer to see if it would shrink and pop off. Nothing. Next I took a hammer and screw driver and had to dig under it in a few places to pop it off. HOLY CRAP was it stuck. I damaged the tape underneath getting it off. That made me think of something....

For my next piece I decided I would need some leverage to pop it off. I placed two small strips of kapton tape 75 percent of the way underneath at either end. I then covered them with ABS juice and clicked print. It printed perfectly over the tape and 0 warping again! When it was time to remove the print I just lifted up the tape and with a little force, BINGO it popped off. I can't wait to try this method again. I dont see why it wouldnt work. It reminded me of taking the batteries out of something when you have to pull the little string to pop them out.

Right after popping the print off using the tape as pull strings

At the end I had something fun to play with! Thing1642 a Geneva wheel. Really a cool little indexing device. 

On a side not we will be moving soonish so I dont know how this will affect my printing, I foresee some new calibration needed after moving. 

Flexible Webcam Arm

So I saw a MakerBot webcam attachment http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:8269 which inspired me to make something similar that would work with my webcam. This will allow me to take pictures, video, and time lapse of stuff I print.

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:52533 is mine. I dont know if anyone will actually ever print it, but the link segments might be useful for something.

The mounting clip is in the foreground. 6 legs, and then the bracket that fits the camera. 

Im mad this photo is turned. Blogger keeps turning it on me. Just tip your head and you will see the chain attached to the acrylic plate on top of my printer. I tried to arc the links nice and evenly so it would look better. It is assembled using M3x16 bolts, washers, and nuts. I tightened them down pretty tight (not to tight so it wouldnt break the plastic)

Probably time lapse videos of future prints on the way!

Bears?!

So I tried printing thingiverses Brown Bear and the results were very pleasing! I set the scale for 40% of the original size to save on plastic. It also only has 10% fill. I wanted to play with the slidder bar in Kisslicer that allows you to print faster or slower.

The bear on the right was printed at 80% precision. This just means that if you take the difference between my max set speeds and make it a scale of 0-100 it was printed at 20 (slow). The print on the left was printed at 100% precision, make it the slowest setting I have set. On the bear on the right you can see very clearly where each layer starts. This is because I had a setting turned on the extrudes .2mm of material after each move and 0mm of retraction. Because of this there was just a little bit of extra material at the start of each layer. 

After I changed that value the 0 the seams cleaned up super well on the slow bear. But for some reason, just above the slow bears elbow, 1 layer is a little wider than the rest. At first I thought the print shifted, but nope its a little ledge the whole way around. Must just be the way it was sliced. 

So a post or so ago I mentioned that I crashed the print head and had to relevel. Well the bed is level but my z height clearly needs to be adjusted. I am having problems with tip drag, even with a z-offset setting. I need to just tweak my homing sensor up a tiny bit. 

Bringing in the new year with a kiss

So I made an upgrade yesterday to Kisslicer to see how it would do. First thing off it was extruding any material. I finally found the setting to make it work. Shorty after I crashed the head into the table. Well this required a whole bunch of calibration to fix.  I kept printing my little calibration cubes like normal until I was "satisfied". Nothing better than a kiss on New Years right?

Well next I decided to print something New Years themed. Thing 36257 was just what I needed. I decided to print 3 and make little tweaks between each of them. They all came out pretty good but still had some work to do. Enjoy your New Years and be safe!

This is a timelapse of the 2013 item being printed

One of them

Picture of all 3

First Print With Blue

Well now that I finally got the print bed level, and the new filament in I was able to print. On my first attempt to print something I had a little issue. The filament got to fat at one point and jammed the print head. The filament holds steady at 3.07-3.09mm but one little section got up to 3.67mm! To those of you who know about 3d printing reading this, you know that is a big issue. Well I had to heat the hot end up to 240 Celsius and pull it out with pliers with all my might. I couldn't believe how bad it was jammed in there. I then had to do some minor adjustments since I lifted up on the z-axis while doing this.

Anyhow, once I got it running again here is a little owl I printed while writing my previous post. The orange is from a few weeks ago but the blue is with the new filament, just scaled down a little.

Farming meets Engineering

So I finally have a update! It involves my background in farming and my education in Engineering. I have been working hard at developing some much needed supports for our container garden. We live on the third floor of a building on top of a big hill, this means tons of wind. We wanted to grow some veggies this summer and the best option we had was some container gardening. The only problem, the wind out on the deck. I decided that I wanted to make some kind of support for the plants.

The second problem was, if I tied them directly to the pole it would limit the plants movement in the wind so much it could make it brittle (first zip tied plants directly to pole but eventually the plants broke). By allowing it a little freedom to move around they seem to be doing much better.


These little things are what I came up with.

These legs slide down onto a wooden rod stuck into the pots. They are fully configurable, 1 leg (not shown), 2 legs (not shown), 3 legs, 4 legs, 1 slot deep (not shown), 2 deep, and they all accept extension arms. There are holes that allow for zip ties to go through to attach the extensions, attach a clamp (shown above 4 arm) and to attack the plant in the large semi circles without crimping the stem of the plant.

This shows a 4 leg (development version not finals seen in previous) holding up the stems of some young cucumber plants. There is a small hole in the side of the part with a screw to tighten it against the pole at the height desired.

In this picture it shows 3 young tomato plant. You can also see an extension arm added to reach out to the one plant a little too far away. 

This picture is a little dark because I still have to keep this plant inside. These are some beans that grow very rapidly and damage easily in the high winds out on the deck. I have two of the 3 short legged arms and one normal 3 leg with extensions to spread the leaves out better for more sunlight in the window. 

Overall I couldn't be much happier with the way these turned out. Very easy to print parts, longest one taking 1 hour, and highly configurable. 

When printing I use a "Brim" to prevent the long skinny legs from curling up. The "Brim" technique takes the normal purge loops and puts them up tight to the part. This additional surface area helps the part stay stuck to the beg the entire print. 

Lions and Tigers and.... Whale Tails?

So the wife has been asking me to model the Whale Tails for a while since we always drive by them and they are visible from her office. After a lot of modeling and a few failed prints I finally got them to print well!

Now these are definitely very hairy when they print. That's because the printer prints the perimeter on the left one, the perimeter on the right, then back to the left for infill, then back to the right for infill, then back to the left for the next layer. In between each of the move stages a little bit of plastic oozes out of the nozzle and drags across the gap. 

I little post production cleaning and they are good to go! Also I printed some lion heads :) No real reason I guess, but why not?! PS maybe I lied a little... no tigers..

Garden Spout

Printing a water spout to fit a 2 liter bottle for the wife and watering the garden 

Works like a charm! Threads on, a little loose but after taping the threads on the bottle its nice and snug

It was a pretty fast print since its mostly perimeters

Soppha

Another complex print handled beautifully. Soppha's head is an excellently detailed miniature statue. when holding at a distance the print is truly beautiful. Unfortunately due to the position of my circuit board I am limited to 42mm of print height. I will soon be changing that! Then I can make her even bigger. 

My recommendation to fellow reprappers who try to print her this size, set the purge perimeter in slic3r to 5x around 3 layers thick 0mm from the part. It will make the base of the print for her a little bit bigger and easier to stick to the bed. The first print came off the bed when I got to her neck.

3d Knot!

So I decided with the new upgrade I should try something a little more complex. I downloaded the STL files for a knot. Which is one continuous loop printed on a little platform. The loop never touches it self and passes through the various openings. This is something that would be impossible to machine so it definitely shows the capabilities of 3d printing. 

Time lapse of print. 1400mm of filament, 70min 15sec of print time

Finished, looks a little hairy in some sections but it will clean up nice

Just another view before cleanup

Post cleanup Top

Post Cleanup Side