A Clonedel transplant

It seems that a year of printing parts, 16 offspring plus many other items, has had its toll on Willow.

I also noticed that the filament has not been feeding well resulting in very poor prints.  Looking for the culprit led me to my idler. The original was cracked and when I was talking to Matt at Metrix Create: Space he suggested I replace it with a Clonedel idler.

There are more pictures of the transplant and the original idler here.

After breaking a tooth off my x pulley at the end of the year I broke another tooth off a few days ago. The broken tooth is actually the same one as before but on the other end.

This time I replaced it with a new one that was printed for me by Open3DP.


And finally I just noticed that my z end stop spring is cracked as well.

I am not sure how I want to fix that yet.  But will probably go with a Prusa style clamp on the guide rod.

An Assembled Offspring

I have not had reports back about most of the part sets that I have made, however here is a set, Prusa #4, that has been assembled and is already printing upgrades and things.

Photo: Gary J. Helriegel © 2011

Gary, thank you for sharing your picture and I look forward to seeing more prints in the future.

A Ceramic Tile Print Bed - Part 2

I finally made time to pull off the old bed and drill the holes in the new tile.  I always hate to mess with the printer unless it is broken, but I had waited long enough to find out how well the tile would work.

I had read some things about mounting the bed on only three points instead of four and thought that made sense.  So I designed & printed a mount to attach to the froglet on the 180° side.

I then removed the bed and springs.

 

I decided that I could gain some height by cutting off the screws on the y carriage.

After blocking all the electronics I cut one screw off.  I then decided that the amount of metal debris created was risky and removed the carriage to cut the remaining screws.
After cutting the screws off I drilled holes to mount the new support.

I then marked the first two hole on the tile and drilled them (under water).

I then used the first two holes to locate the third

This last hole had a small amount of chip out on the top surface since I drilled it from the back.  Most of this was removed when I drilled the countersink.

I then temporarily mounted the tile so I could mark and then drill the purge hole (at 0,0)

Finally, with the assistance of some tape, I mounted the bed using new springs.

I gained almost 12mm of height:

I am printing on it right now and it is working beautifully and is overall a very good success.

My only concerns are that the springs I am using are not quite as stiff as think I would like and I added some weight (about 13oz from where I was).

New light bar PCBs

After making my last light bar I had a few people ask me about buying one.  So I fixed the issues I had with my first iteration of the PCB and had 3 more made using DorkbotPDX's PCB service.  These boards are much nicer than the one from BatchPCB and they came faster as well (it is also cheaper if you need 3 of each board).

 

It should now fit on a standard Mendel carriage, Rhys-Jones multi-material carriage, and a Prusa carriage.

I love the purple solder mask and the silkscreen detail it very nice.  I plan to assemble one of them to check that the changes I made to the PCB work as expected.  After that I will have a production run made and have kits available to purchase. 

A Ceramic Tile Print Bed

I was using a piece of polycarbonate that was to thin and was allowing parts to warp by lifting the PC sheet slightly.  When thinking about stable, flat surfaces I realized ceramic tile could be a nice surface.  So I went to my local home improvement store and bought a 6"x6" tile and tried it both plain and with blue tape on it.  PLA did not stick to it alone but with the tape it works very well.  It is very flat and stable, with the only downside I can see being that it is a little on the heavy side.



After proving to myself that it would work I thought about options for mounting a larger tile and tested drilling and countersinking holes in a scrap piece of tile I had.





This also looks like it will work very nicely.  My next step was to get a larger tile.  The only problem here is that the Mendel print bed is not a standard tile size.  However my local home improvement store will cut tile you buy there for free, at least small quantities, so I had them cut a 12" tile down to 9.5"x9.5" (which is a little bigger than the stock bed).



My next step is to drill the mounting holes, remove the wooden bed and mount my new tile bed.  I am also thinking about adjusting the spring mount configuration to get a little more Z room and make the bed easily removable.

I may also do some testing with heating the tile as I think it would heat nicely as well.

Willow gets a new light

I had a light I made using perf board that fit on the old x carriage.

Unfortunately it would not fit on my new x carriage, so I designed a board with KiCad and had it made using BatchPCB.

The idea being to have 4 different sets of 3 LEDs.   I chose White, Orange, Green, and UV.

The UV is very cool with the Ultimachine Blue PLA.

I originally designed it to have the LEDs wired in parallel but after getting the boards I realized that was a bad way to drive the LEDs so I changed the board by breaking a few traces and adding a few jumpers.

A Holiday Prusa Mendel

I found http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5002 and the novelty of this holiday remix of the Prusa Mendel was enough for me to try printing one.  Kliment is making a holiday themed build plate for each day starting on December 2nd and ending on the 24th.  You can print one plate each day and will have a Prusa by Christmas.

I have pictures of all the parts I have so far here.

I like the simplicity of the Prusa but am taking a slightly different approach to RepRap simplification with my Integrated Parametric RepRap  (more on that soon).

More Plastic, a Fourth offspring, and an update to IPR

I used the money I made selling my first three Mendels to buy more PLA from Ultimachine.  I bought 2 rolls each of Green, Blue, White, Silver, and Black.  Someone that I met at Metrix: Create Space is buying one roll of the Green from me.

Willow is happily restocked with plastic and the Green was used to finish a fourth Mendel set that will be listed on eBay in the morning.

I also made some progress on my Integrated Parametric RepRap work and posted a new version of the OpenSCAD files on Thingiverse.

3rd Mendel Set for Sale & More About Moustaches

Willow has recently completed it's third complete set of Mendel parts! This set was printed using mostly Blue Translucent, UV Happy, UltiMachine PLA.  I did run out of that PLA before finishing the extruder and a few of the y bar clamps, so the those are printed in the Natural PLA.

 

They are on eBay currently and close on Nov 18, 2010 at 5:56:54 PST.  I have cleaned them up some but have not reamed the holes.  They come with a certificate of lineage (for anyone tracking that) suitable for framing.  Check out the eBay listing for more information.

I also have a collection of items on etsy that I am selling to help support Movember.  During the month of November I am donating 100% of the sale price of all of these items to the Movember Foundation.  Some of these items were 3D printed on Willow.  If you want to see my slow growing moustache updates or donate money directly to Movember you should visit my MoSpace Page.

Second Set of Mendel Parts on eBay

Willow has recently completed it's second complete set of Mendel parts! This set was printed using Blue Translucent, UV Happy, UltiMachine PLA.

They are on eBay currently at a $76.00 bid and close on Nov 01, 2010 at 08:06:10 PDT.  I have cleaned them up some but have not reamed the holes.  They come with a certificate of lineage (for anyone tracking that) suitable for framing.  Check out the eBay listing for more information.

Leaking Heaters...

My current heater was working very well extruding PLA at 230C, which seems a little high but the parts are coming out nicely.  It had started leaking like many of the others I have seen with PTFE insulators.

Then it finally plugged up...  I tried cleaning it out without disassembling it, but this did not work.
I then disassembled the hotend to find the plug and remove it.  During this I discovered that the wood retainer I had been using was starting to char away.

So I began work on a new design that I had been thinking about for a while.  This is based on the BfB hotend that many people like but can be built with only a drill press, hacksaw, rotary tool (Dremel), and belt sander (I plan to post directions soon).

I also found an excellent source for bootlace ferrules.

You can buy these at craft stores in the jewelery section.  They are designed for crimping necklace cords and this bag cost $2.99.

So far I have done hand push tests and can easily push filament at 165°C.

Now I have to change out my x carriage for  larger one (http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3594, which I already printed before my failure).