Very often those who are preparing to build a printer from scratch or modify one are taken by the doubt about which type of extruder to use and the choice arises between wade and bowden extruders.
Continue reading wade and bowden extruders
Very often, talking to people who see that I have built a 3d printer, I get asked this question “what can you do with it?”.
Doing a simple search on the web we see that there are many sites that provide for free hundreds of drawings of objects reproducible with a 3d printer. The site, I think the richest of these projects, is in my opinion Thingiverse, a community open to all those who want to try their hand at designing and drawing aimed at 3d printing, both experienced cad users and newbies on the subject. On the site you will find everything, from cellphone stands, to the famous and useful USB cable reels, earphone holders, raspberry or arduino cases, covers for most of the cellphones on the market and obviously supports for the now widespread intelligent assistants.
Continue reading don’t have a 3d printer? if you had it what would you do with it?
We wanted to try an E3D V6 clone hotend as we had heard good things about it and bought this kit here
Given the small price difference with this kit we chose this other one of the E3D V6 equipped with nozzle of various sizes
Continue reading E3D V6 J-Head a hotend that amazes….
An action camera gimbal made with:
1 arduino nano you can find here
1 3-axis gyro module and MPU6050 accelerometer can be purchased here
2 9g sg90 micro servo available here
1 x 4-slot AA battery holder
and a 3d printer
You do not expect to find in this article the solution to all the problems of 3D printing, but more a suggestion for the analysis of the results to allow you to improve the quality of the final result.
I took photos of 3D printed pieces of an acquaintance of mine as an example, obtained with unsatisfactory quality, to analyze the defects and then try to eliminate them by trying to identify the causes.
The more experienced will surely find my considerations useless, but to some neophytes, like me, maybe they will suggest where to act to improve the quality of 3D prints.
It being understood that a good printer, a good hotend and good filaments certainly make the difference, let’s see the first photo, a classic …… the detachment from the print bed.
In the photo below we see the inverted piece with the angle that tends to go down, actually to go up 🙂
Let’s see what happened.
Continue reading problems with 3d prints
What is warping? warping is that defect that is sometimes created in our prints due to a characteristic of the materials we use for our 3d prints whether it is PLA, ABS, PTFE etc etc and which in practice consists in the enrichment of the ends of the bases of the our 3d prints.
Like most existing materials, plastic, of any kind, undergoes changes in volume due to thermal variations. When we go to heat the filament in our hotend, in addition to changing from a solid state to a fluid one, it undergoes a volume variation that can affect the result even in a quite evident way. This not only happens when it heats up but also when it gets cold, naturally with the opposite consequence and with different characteristics depending on the material used.
Now let’s think about a piece with a fairly wide base and see what happens at the time of the first layer. The heated filament, for example at 210 °, is deposited on a much colder surface undergoing a thermal alteration which varies its dimensions by decreasing them. The second layer built on the first will have a warmer base than the first and therefore will undergo a different thermal shock and so on the third and fourth layer.