Month: July 2016

Lost pla Casting: adding Sprues

I have been playing around with lost PLA casting (lost PETG in my case).I wanted to incorporate sprues into my objects when printed if possible. I could do them much better if printed rather than manually glued on after the fact.For anyone unfamiliar with casting: Sprues are the pathways that the molten metal flows through into the mold cavernI was wondering if there was an easy way to add printed sprues to a STL. It is easy to do with my own designs since I have the source. Modifying STLs is very tricky and usually not worth it. Here, I just want to add material onto an STL.Occasionally, I find a thingiverse object that would be cool to cast though. http://ift.tt/29IzPb0

Monoprice Mini Thermistor

I’m not sure that too many of these printers are out in the wild yet but I’d like to inform people of an issue I came across. I’m sure those of you somewhat considering purchasing this printer are well aware of how the hot-end temperature tends to drift a good bit around its set point. To fix this you need to manually apply a different set of PID parameters. Which is all good and well..Unfortunately, much to my dismay I discovered they don’t actually solder the thermistor wires, they don’t even crimp them with metal ferules like many do. It would appear they simply heatshrink them and hope for the best. My temperature would read fine one moment, and then suddenly drop 20C or more. One print actually failed because of the thermistor dropout protection.Anyways, I took it apart to find the thermistor basically coming out of the heatshrink with little/no effort. I soldered it to the wires and wrapped it in a bit of kapton tape. It now sits nuts on at the set temperature. Much better!I’m having second thoughts about recommending this printer to anybody as a starter printer. The shoddy thermistor work could very well cause some serious issues. http://ift.tt/29JtlrE

Opinions on fan ducts

I’m finally going to put a print cooling fan on my printer and have a 50mm x 12mm blower fan on the way. Mostly I paint PLA, but recently I’ve been playing with PETG and really like the way it prints.The printer is the rough equivalent of a Folgertech 2020 designed and built by me (before I saw the Folgertech) and I’m running dual E3Dv6 type knockoff hot ends. Going to a single hot end is an option I’m considering to offset the added mass of the fan and duct.Anyhow, is there any sort of consensus on the type of duct that works best? I’d really like to be able to see the nozzle as the print is running.This is probably one of those question that has a different answer for everyone, but I figure I’ll ask and see what you guys with far more experience have to say about it. http://ift.tt/29PvTYt

Help with maker select v2, bed too low?

So I have this issue where after I select home all the bed is so low that even extending the springs all the way loose on the left side it is still to high in the center. On top of this it is unlevel and higher on the right hand side of the bed which caused the nozzle to hit over there.At first I manually turned the black pieces on the rods to compensate for this and it worked but now when I print the extruder is too high and I don’t know what to do.I have googled this alot but am not sure where parts like the x stop, z stop are located on this thing, or even what I was doing before. Any help would be appreciated, keep in mind I am very new to this so any websites that can lay out to me what and where the parts on this thing are would be awesome!Also, Is there any way to change where home all goes manually without rewiring stuff? http://ift.tt/29Pbe6t

MarkOne 3D Printer- evaluation and prediction of the elastic properties of fiber reinforced 3D printers

This is a study that I wrote and was published recently where we looked at the mechanical properties of the MarkOne 3D printer by Mark Forged. The article can be found here: http://ift.tt/29OpJFf. The article can be downloaded for free until September 6, 2016. http://ift.tt/29OCujb