After printing a box full of trilego at MakerFaire last weekend, my MakerBot decided it needed a break…actually one of the pins on the heater board decided it needed to break (the HEAT pin near the middle of the photo): The constant motion of the print platform, and the wires connected to it eventually jiggled…
Over the weekend I experimented with some new timelapse workflows using my GoPro Hero2 camera. It involved setting up the GoPro to shoot stills at specific intervals (every 5 seconds in the case of the Sappho’s Head and every 30 seconds in the case of the Crystal Bowl) and then downsizing the stills (using an…
This past weekend I completed the longest continuous print yet on my Prusa Mendel…just under 9 hours straight. It’s the Basalt Pencil Holder from Thingiverse. It was printed at 100% scale, 0.20mm layer height with 0.10 infill on a J-Head with 0.35mm nozzle in translucent green PLA. It reached 89.8mm in height (one of the…
My pal Brad (aka Sublime) has been working hard over the last 4 months or so to fine tune his custom designed, pretty much from scratch, portable 3d printer. He’s finally able to offer it for sale via an Indiegogo campaign. As has been mentioned numerous times on this blog, I have been helping with…
I bought and assembled my first 3d printer kit last summer, a MakerBot Thing-O-Matic (the device in the middle). Since then, it’s printed the Reprap Prusa Mendel printer (on the left) which I assembled and gives me a bigger build area. Both of those printers have contributed different parts (in ABS and PLA plastics) for…
A brief update on the build status of my prototype version of Brad’s (aka Sublime) forthcoming Tantillus 3d printer and my Prusa Mendel Reprap printer. Last weekend, Brad & I mounted most of the printed parts, motors and hardware for the extruder and build platform. Part of that exercise was for Brad to see how…
It’s been a few weeks since my last build update so I figured it might be good time to post some updates on all the printers I’ve got on the go at the moment. Prusa Mendel I’ve been tweaking my Prusa quite a bit lately and have been getting really good results as you can…
This past weekend, Brad came over and helped me tweak things on my Prusa Mendel. He immediately noticed a few issues in the prints I had previously made. I ended up swapping out my PLA bushing X-carriage with an updated Greg’s X-carriage with LM8UUs (soooo smooth now!), with the intergrated belt tensioning system (a pain…
After a night of fixing various problems, I finally have my Prusa printing objects that actually resemble objects! It’s no where near calibrated nor perfect but it’s working reliably now that I have the J-Head hotend installed along with Greg’s ‘Guidler’ extruder along with the motor strain relief bracket. I had to fix a number…
This past weekend, I hosted the guys from our Fraser Valley RepRap group at my place so that we could actually setup our machines to print and tinker. This is something we’ve wanted to do at our regular meetings but the folks at Boston Pizza, while very accommodating, probably wouldn’t be too keen on us…