#prusa i3 mk2

[t-spawn]

Forged myself my own Master Sword from Breath of the wild. I guess I’m almost ready to fight Calamity Ganon but I have a few things to do first. I’m sure Zelda can hold him back a little while longer.

[cameronaugust]

Hey! I found the little guy!. Still gotta print the trigger and hammer assembly, then I can start sanding. But I may want to reprint it in grey for the slide not interfere with the paint.

[foxsdaybook]

So this is a little pendant thing that was 3D PRINTED IN PLASTIC IMPREGNATED WITH METAALLLLLL (bronze to be specific)

as you can maybe see, I was able to put a dull shine on it with some 220 sandpaper and some 0000 steal wool

hopefully the two different lighting conditions kind of capture the shine? also: handling it feels exactly like metal, weight, surface fishes, everything... but as soon as you drop it on a table, the illusion is shattered when it goes “clunk” rather than the “ring” of metal

when you look at it edge-on, you can see the print lines on the inside... but the bottom has some of those surface details all blended together, which kind of makes its look like it was cast

Honestly, designing this didn’t even take that long, I’ll probably upload the file to thingiverse if anyone shows interest, only takes about 45 minutes to print at this scale and 0.15mm layer height

Getting the first layer to stick was awful... I had to pull out every trick I knew: bed was heated to 60˚ C, stuck painter’s blue tape to the bed, cleaned the tape with isopropyl alcohol, and applied glue to the surface of the tape... just barely got it to stick

[cameronaugust]

One of my favorite things about having a printer is printing upgraded parts for it. Spool should flow with much less resistance now. https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1832235

[foxsdaybook]

Hey all, made a Hexasphericon, or as I like to call it a wibbly

Check it out on my thingiverse as well!

Its a volume with 1 face (dark) and 2 edges (light), think of it a bit like a 3D Mobius strip, its heavily inspired by the somewhat recent Maker’s Muse video, but its also a brass casting. It rolls by turning 2/3 of a turn in one direction, then turning 90˚ in another direction for the last 1/3 of a turn, then repeating that

I did the 3D design myself (in sketchup), printed it out (sadly didn’t take a photo of the 3D print though), and then cast it in brass using my dad’s vacuum casting machine/ setup.

It’s relatively easy to make, assuming you’re familiar with vacuum casting and have a 3D printer. Since this a 2-piece print (as it was for Maker’s Muse), the first step is to use wax to fill in/ hide the seam, then attach sprues/ air holes using wax. Next is to make the mould, which is just pouring in the normal mould mixture, and set it in the vacuum caster to vacate the air in the plaster, then let it dry. Next is the burnout procedure, where the mould is first taken to 200-400˚F to melt the wax out, then taken to 500-700˚F to melt out the plastic, during this step, the tray under the mould had to be cleaned several times, before the plastic on it caught too badly and vitrified to the plate, last step was to take the mould up to about 1200˚F to fire it/ prepare it for pouring. To pour, a... generous overestimate of brass was melted using an oxy-acetylene torch and quickly poured into the mould, which was set in the vacuum casting machine, and all the air was vacated from the brass.

The end result shows every 3D-printing layer (which was quite a few with only a 0.1mm layer height), and on the polished edge, it looks a little like Damascus patterned metal. I didn’t think I’d like seeing the layers, but it actually looks really good on the polish, and while I may polish it more, its more or less done at the moment.

Casting 3D prints is actually way easier than I thought it would be (with the big fancy vacuum caster), and there is a good chance I’ll be doing more of it!

[foxsdaybook]

Hey ya’ll: quick update, I have begun to pimp my printer!

I’ve added a new, very very quiet fan to replace the rather noisy heater fan, and as part of this, I had to print a new funnel-thing to direct the air.

This was the noisiest part of my printer after adjusting the X and Y axis belt. I have not yet run tests on what is the next noisiest, but I think its going to be sudden large movements in the X and Y, or the Z in general... none of which I know how to fix...

To get an idea of how quiet it is, you can play the movie above.

note: there is no movie, thats how quiet it is... s’ kind of funny now, b/c when my cooling fan comes online, it has a really sudden chugging sound... if I can find a quiet fan the same size, I might replace it, but s’ kind of an odd size.

Fan made by Noctua

Funnel courtesy Area51

Print time of the funnel was 2.5 hours, installation time was about another 1.5 hours (though I could have knocked it down a bit if I knew that the Prusa fan pin adapter was different from the Noctua’s from the beginning), so a grand total of about 4 hours to get my printer from pretty silent to nearly silent

Hopefully the implementation has not messed with the heater’s cooling rates too much, if it has then I may have to go back to my old fan, which will be a hassle, I’ll run tests soon though.

[foxsdaybook]

So: real-time story time:

I decided at around 11:30am on Sunday that I would work on a 3D print order. I selected a file that was rather large, but my program said would be done in 6 hours.

it is now 4 in the morning on Monday, and it isn’t even halfway done. Turns out that if the print is over 24 hours, its supposed to say 1:6:minutes:seconds, but the “1 day” part is cut off... so in other words, not only have I been printing for 16.5 hours, I’ve also got another 13-16 hours to go.

How am I sleeping? well, obviously I’m not. I tried taking larger doses of melatonin, that didn’t work, I tried putting up a sheet wall between my bed and the printer (its like, 4 feet away), that didn’t work. I even tried sleeping in my bathroom, to do that I had to lie with my back on the floor and my legs on top of my toilet in a sort of “reverse sitting” position.

So now I’m giving up on sleep except though pure exhaustion, all the while the servo-motor noise is slowly creeping into my brain... I think once as I finish this order, I’m going to work on making my printer as silent as possible