Moving!

No worries I havent put printing completely aside! I have been taking a slight break. We have been very busy with the home buying process. We are closing Monday so once we get things moved and settled in I will be up and running!      

To prep for moving I decided it would be best to mount the printer on something stable. The A frame style allows the printer to twist a little when picking up. I didnt want to screw something major out of calibration so I picked up a 2'x2' square of 3/4" plywood from the hardware store. Probably could have used a thinner sheet but I wanted to be safe. 

I then printed 4 brackets (blue) that would clamp to the M8 rod and allow L brackets that I had on on hand be attached. I placed one just inside each corner. 

Here is a close up of on of them. After I realized I could have printed the brackets as Ts and eliminated the metal portion. Oh well. It is now super sturdy and ready to move!

I also put binder clips on all the axis to make sure that they dont slide around. I know the prominate ones in the picture are the ones holding the bed but if you look at the axis you will see them holding it in plane. 

I also disconnected the power supply and packed it up. After moving I will make some brackets to attach the power supply to the board as well. Its a proper step in making this a mobile printer!

Hopefully I will be up and running in a few short weeks!

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!

New tape, and starting print code

I know it's been a while since I have done anything with the printer. This one mainly because of the last crash I had where it ripped up all the tape. I was having a hard time getting motivated to fix the bed. I finally got around to it since I am on a 3-day weekend! I took a lot of time placing the new tape to  not be wrinkled or bubbled. No gaps between strips either (within reason). 

My print area is framed by the blue corner marks. The pencil rectangle is on the ceramic and couldn't get it off. It is not as wide as I would like because at the max height my cooling with crash into the frame. 

The next big thing I did I cant really show a picture of. It is a programming thing. In KISSlicer and other slicing programs it is common practice to put some start code and end code to add to every print. Such as home all axis, reset extruder, etc. Here is what I did and why;

G-code Prefix

G28 ; home all axes

G1 X0 Y0 Z10 ; move to z10

G92 E0 ; reset extruder

G-Code Postfix

M104 S0 ; turn off temperature

G28 X0  ; home X axis

G28 Y0  ; home y axis

M84     ; disable motors

The Key line is the underlined one. What this does is bring the z level up to 10 before it starts to print. It will then move on a very nice linear diagonal until it hits the point where the print is going to start (in my case usually (100,100,0). The reason I did this was because it allows it to clear the tape in-case there is a wrinkle or bubble and not rip the tape up. Also if a little piece of plastic is hanging off the nozzle it might catch the tape edges too. If you look in my previous posts you will see where the tip dragged and ripped the bed the shreds. Now if it is going to drag it will only do it at the start point of print instead of the path to get there. This happened more than a few times in the past because I like the first layer so thin for ultimate adhesion. 

Mountain Top Pt4

So I know it has been a while. But trust me I have spent a lot of time getting to this point. This took a lot of time and I worked on it in small batches. I didn't want to update the photos until the mountain top was complete (without trees and some additional accents like hikers or animals).

Here you can see where I have added the basic ground foam over the painted base from pt3. 

Next I began adding in some bushes and smaller rocks

Lots of rocks and bushes added to bring it to life

Close up of the front rock. Little shiny due to flash glare. Will need to rub some brown chalk on it to dull it for future pictures. Remember this front rock is only 1" tall and the ones on the next level in background are 2" tall

If you were to climb my mountain and look down from the top this is the view you would have. 

With a sky backdrop looking up the 5 inch mountain. I have yet to put some trees on it, but you get the idea. 

Here is the overview of it. I will need to blend this into the next section of the layout and then add my accents. Hope you enjoy it!

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

Mountain Top Pt 3

I wasn't completely satisfied with the mountain landscape. Yeah I know it still needs ground foam and trees and details, but it was missing something. The wife had to make a trip to AC Moore for some supplies, so I tagged along. I found a much bigger selection in the scene-a-rama section. 

I picked up some thin sheets of plywood (1/32 and 1/164), to build structures out of later. I also picked up some little containers for when I mix my paints. I wanted something with a lid so I could shake it. Also got a carton of casting plaster, since I know I will need the rockmolds again elsewhere on the layout. They had a Ripplin' Water Kit I figured I would try out at some point. And finally another rock mold.

 This came with smaller rocks, 10 on the same size tray instead of 3. It was just a basic kit including only the molds and plaster. 

Those are some nice rocks you got there

Test fit

Spackled and glued in place 

Remember this is what it looked like

Landscape of mountain top: Complete! Now I just need to start adding ground foam, tullus, trees, etc. Look for my next update, hopefully soon!

Mountain Top Pt2

So now that the mountain was covered, it was time to make some rocks! The rock mold only made 3 rocks, each were pretty big (since I'm in Z-scale) but more to come on rocks in Pt3 ;)

Test fit of the 3 rocks from the mold

I glued the rocks on, then sealed the gaps using a lightweight wall spackling. I love using this stuff on my layouts. If you use it and find it hard to spread out, just use a mister bottle and wet it down. It will take longer to dry but when it does it will be much smoother. 

A close up of a rock

So now it came time to color the rocks. The kit came with it's own paint but I decided not to use it. It was in limited quantity and I didn't want to run out and not be able to match it later. So I used some acrylic paints I had on hand.

I mixed up a light brown, a dark brown, and a very watered down black. You notice I mixed in bottle caps, this was because it was all I had available, and it allowed me to control how many droplets to water ratio. 

The rocks get speckled in the different shades of brown (1/3 area light 1/3 area dark), then the whole surface covered in watered down black.  

remember this is what it looked like before paint

Next I had to cover the flat areas with a concentrated dark brown mixture. This is to resemble dirt. This will later be covered in ground foam, but any area that is thin or shins through will show the dark brown. Looks pretty good eh? (white spot on-top of the right rock is the sun BTW, it is actually the same color as the face)

Part 3 will take the mountain to the next level of detailing. 

Mountain Top Pt1

While the wife and I were shopping in the craft store so she could pick up some scrap booking things. This caught my eye.

 I have never purchased a scenery kit before (except buildings) on my other layouts. I knew I had a mountain top to decorate, so I figured I would see how this kit recommended to do it. I knew woodland scenics does tons of model railroading supplies, so why not trust there diorama sets? I knew that the trees are not going to be to scale for my use, but at least I got some rock molds and some good directions.

Around 2 weeks ago I decided to open the kit and see what becomes of it. The Kit contents: Plaster cloth, glue, spray bottle, rock paints, earth undercoat paint, shaker, different turf media colors and grades, tullus, casting plaster, rock mold, and an instruction booklet.

I modified the foam slightly to have a nice steep face since the rock molds are pretty big. (The big rock about 36 scale feet tall by 70 scale ft wide)

 After wadding up some strips of news paper to help decrease the intensity of some of the steps, I got to work with the plaster cloth. 

I made sure to cover up the back side too. This was to help complete a shell so that it wont be able to peel up on the edges and come disconnected. 

Nice complete coverage!

Let the Land Take Shape

Next I used my pink insulation to start replacing the paper cards that I had folded up before.

Start with some basic shapes

Next fill in some thick sheets and mark out where to remove material

Using a rasp I cleared away the material

When I decided to put in that upper loop in the corner, I knew it would be in a mountain

Sooooo... Heres the basic shape of the mountain. The tunnel port you see is scratch built, and will be one of my next posts! Stay tuned.