More 3D Printing

So, as penance to my little project of building a 3D printer, I promised my friend Harout that I'd print him all he needs to build his own Mendel Prusa as well - he was generous enough to provide me with some leftovers from his 3D printer project, and it's taken 2-3 months of experimentation to finally get up to what I'd call "production" level quality - the unfortunate thing is that I'm running out of my best working materiel - the PLA he provided!  This PLA stuff melts at a nice temp, cools fast when a fan is pointing at it, and hardens quite well too - making some serious stuff.

Here's a my RepRap in action, printing an endstop holder in PLA:



Now that the quality of the output is way up, I've started getting some parts together - and tonight I actually started printing one of the bigger pieces - what I'd call one of the hardest pieces in fact because it's been printing for over 3 hours thus far, and it has one huge nasty overhang.

For my non-3D printing experienced readers, let me take a moment to explain something about these 3D printers - they use something called additive manufacturing - this means that it prints things out by just adding materiel onto the print surface - and building upwards.  Kind of like dropping melted wax onto a table very accurately and making a pyramid.

This sounds simple enough, however, when you're printing without some kind of support materiel, and you need to print out something with holes in it, you may find that you're in a pickle because you can't print in the air... or can you?

I've been fearing printing this part for quite some time, but had to give it a try - and it knocked it right out!  Something like this drooping down or falling off after 2.5 hours of printing would really suck!



Anyway, the results were excellent as well - here's the final product once it was done!



Harout, you'd better be ready buddy - I'll have your kit printed soon...

Oh yeah, and I've STILL not gotten that black ABS stuff to print yet - it's EVIL!  I'm going to try a different hobbed bolt and combine that with a .75mm printhead and a higher-temperature extruder upgrade next as getting the black stuff to print will give me enough material to print another frame for myself!

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