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3D Printing


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1.  What do you have

2.  What's the favorite thing you've made

3.  What's the most common type of things you make

4.  If you were to buy from scratch right now, what would you get?

 

I've been perusing the stuff off and on for a while, but it still seems too nascent and niche to have a consumer printer that's solid and foolproof, i.e. the Brother Laser Printer of plastics.  Is that about right?  Or is there really reliable stuff now?

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I have a Crealty Ender 5 with a few modifications (bed support, new quiet control board, glass bed). For the price, I'm a big fan. Now that I've got it dialed in, it prints quite well - everything from random enclosures, to parts for an espresso machine, to Nintendo Switch controller holders, to those little wrenches you use to remove bike tires, etc...

That being said, no consumer 3d printer is going to be foolproof. There is a lot of trial and error whether that's playing around with bed temp, extruder temp, filament type, the actual design, fill rate, support structures, etc....

I've made a bunch of things with mine that I'm quite happy with. Probably the biggest achievement was using my 3d printer to build the parts that go into my Lowrider CNC machine.

It's a fun hobby. But you have to treat it as a hobby, not as a tool or office equipment. You will have prints that epically fail and you just have to edit and try again. If that doesn't sound fun, then save yourself the $300-$500 or whatever it is they go for these days. But when it all works as planned, it's pretty fucking cool.

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  • 2 months later...

I should really be all over this.  A variant was invented at UT while I was there.  I have written patents on it.

I'm a geek and a long time ago, I really enjoyed mechanical drawing (art for the artless, like me).

But, like a lot of technological things (raspberry pis, linux computers, etc.), I doubt I would end up making much use of it once the novelty wore off.

Maybe it goes back to why I didn't pursue an engineering career, per se.  I just don't have much creative inspiration.

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  • 11 months later...

Bump. I just ordered a Bambu X1C and I'm super excited to get my hands on it! I did a bunch of 3D modeling while I was an engineering student so im hoping I can remember some of the solidworks tricks I used to know lol

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  • 3 weeks later...

Bump. Got my Bambu X1C and it fucking RULES! I had a nearly perfect benchie 45 minutes after unboxing and setting it all up. Crazy fast self-calibration and bed autoleveling

 

Looking forward to making random shit and doodads, definitely gotta print a lightsaber for my nephew! 

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Posted (edited)

Yeah this thing fuckin RULES! I tried swinging for the fences and set up a 16hr print for this pretty big dice tower just to see how it'd do, and maybe get a fun thing to bring to D&D

Really really easy to use and get excellent results with. This print took 315 grams of PETG filament! From this thingiverse .stl

Edited by Captainant
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So the dominant mode of layering these days is to melt a polymer filament using a three-axis print head?  And that seems to produce a reasonable material?

That's so much remarkably simpler than some of the early methods.  One of the crazier, but actually legit ones used a photopolymer masked with paper, lasers and/or knives operated on three axes trimmed away the paper mask and began to solidify the polymer, which was then hardened using UV light.  

And then there's UT's own Carl Deckard's, that used lasers on three axes to melt a pile of polymer particles into shapes.

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Posted (edited)

FDM is the filament melt like in the video above, and there's also very accessible SLA printing where you have a reservoir of UV-sensitive resin that you use a photomask to cure and it magically draws your item out of the liquid resin. You can get significantly better surface finishes with resin prints, to the point of them being indistinguishable from injection molded pieces. So instead of the paper and photopolymer mask as you're describing, it just uses a Texas Instruments DLP chip to project ultra-accurate light into the resin to cure it. But your choices of material are limited and you have to deal with all the sticky and VOC-filled resins, along with much more post-processing from washing and curing the pieces after printing is complete.

I'm very fortunate to have taken engineering drafting (as a mothafuckin study abroad in Austria!) with Dr. Wood at UT while I was still an engineering student - he was on some of the original patents for 3D printers and this thing that got shipped to my door would make his head explode lol

 

The print process is pretty straight forward: either make your own 3D model or just download one from thingiverse/thangs/whatever, drop it into your slicer program to generate any necessary supports and gcode for the print head pathing, and then send that gcode to your printer and hopefully you don't get hot spaghetti

Edited by Captainant
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Posted (edited)
16 minutes ago, Captainant said:

FDM is the filament melt like in the video above, and there's also very accessible SLA printing where you have a reservoir of UV-sensitive resin that you use a photomask to cure and it magically draws your item out of the liquid resin. You can get significantly better surface finishes with resin prints, to the point of them being indistinguishable from injection molded pieces. So instead of the paper and photopolymer mask as you're describing, it just uses a Texas Instruments DLP chip to project ultra-accurate light into the resin to cure it. But your choices of material are limited and you have to deal with all the sticky and VOC-filled resins, along with much more post-processing from washing and curing the pieces after printing is complete.

I'm very fortunate to have taken engineering drafting (as a mothafuckin study abroad in Austria!) with Dr. Woods at UT while I was still an engineering student - he was on some of the original patents for 3D printers and this thing that got shipped to my door would make his head explode lol

 

The print process is pretty straight forward: either make your own 3D model or just download one from thingiverse/thangs/whatever, drop it into your slicer program to generate any necessary supports and gcode for the print head pathing, and then send that gcode to your printer and hopefully you don't get hot spaghetti

Is the SLA thing Israeli?  I have forgotten the names of the players, but the photopolymer thing came out of a company from Israel that originally tried to trademark "sterelithography," and this sounds like its descendant.

One I worked on used electrodeposition of nickel on charged surfaces.  Actually seemed pretty plausible, but never went anywhere.

Billy Wood?  Drafting at UT in the 80s was super chickenshit, just some three-view and dimensioning stuff in workbooks using graph paper.  The only CAD systems were CADAM on a S/360 and it was horrible.  I took two years of pencil/pen "mechanical drawing" in high school because I liked it so much and learned AutoCAD in the summers at TI.  Back then, they had processors in the monitors to do real-time pans and regens of big assembly drawings so as not to have to wait on the 8086 PCs.  The primary motivation for TI's adoption of CAD was not ease or speed of use, but drawing storage.

Edited by TwiceHorn
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10 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

Billy Wood?

The very same! 

10 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

Is the SLA thing Israeli?  I have forgotten the names of the players, but the photopolymer thing came out of a company from Israel that originally tried to trademark "sterelithography," and this sounds like its descendant.

The SLA thing is basically everyone but especially Chinese manufacturers like Elegoo and Creality - and they're only like $250 for an excellent resin printer! It's nuts.

There's a huge growth of novel printer designs, Creality put out a wild printer that has a belt for a print bed, and the print head is on a 45 degree axis relative to the print surface. It has an infinite Z axis to print with!

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On 4/10/2023 at 9:07 PM, Captainant said:

Yeah this thing fuckin RULES! I tried swinging for the fences and set up a 16hr print for this pretty big dice tower just to see how it'd do, and maybe get a fun thing to bring to D&D

 

Really really easy to use and get excellent results with. This print took 315 grams of PETG filament! From this thingiverse .stl

So how big is the market for Gnome and Fairy housing? 😉

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Posted (edited)

Read about AI architectural tech programs like Midjourney, which can design architectural and designer renderings from words.  The next step is hooking these up to a 3-D printer to create 3-D images/models, and not just flat pieces.   

Edit: Dammit--I see I'm way behind on the thread.  This is already happening. 

Edited by Mdhorn
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10 hours ago, Mdhorn said:

Read about AI architectural tech programs like Midjourney, which can design architectural and designer renderings from words.  The next step is hooking these up to a 3-D printer to create 3-D images/models, and not just flat pieces.   

Edit: Dammit--I see I'm way behind on the thread.  This is already happening. 

There's actually a one-click function in Fusion360 to apply some generative design techniques to optimize topologies for manufacturing (both additive and subtractive manufacturing) or material use reduction

https://www.autodesk.com/solutions/generative-design/manufacturing

And of COURSE someone has had chatGPT produce some 3D models and gcode, which people have printed. It's not very successful but the proof of concept is there

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A few more days of tinkering and I'm starting to figure out some cool tricks to help with support removal. Turns out, PETG and PLA have very poor layer adhesion thanks to chemical properties, so I can use the AMS to switch between the material for where the support touches the model. The end result is a very dimensionally stable model that's not too terrible to remove the supports from. The downside is it goes through a shitload of filament just purging one material to print the next. The model took 12grams of material, but the print used about 35g in total including all the purge cycles. Interesting interesting...

 

Starting to try printing some BattleTech minis, this is my first really nice looking print that still is in one piece after support removal. Mini pics in spoiler so I don't longcat. 

Spoiler

battlemaster_front.thumb.jpeg.09dcbbd1fdd3462c6ce19ab8cab91618.jpegbattlemaster2.thumb.jpeg.1a7c7dc2e45e2e72fc58b6cd7ebd416d.jpegbattlemaster1.thumb.jpeg.7ec1361ec0128fae88212531b07d55bb.jpeg

Bonus points if anyone can ID this mech :D

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Posted (edited)
14 hours ago, Captainant said:

A few more days of tinkering and I'm starting to figure out some cool tricks to help with support removal. Turns out, PETG and PLA have very poor layer adhesion thanks to chemical properties, so I can use the AMS to switch between the material for where the support touches the model. The end result is a very dimensionally stable model that's not too terrible to remove the supports from. The downside is it goes through a shitload of filament just purging one material to print the next. The model took 12grams of material, but the print used about 35g in total including all the purge cycles. Interesting interesting...

 

Starting to try printing some BattleTech minis, this is my first really nice looking print that still is in one piece after support removal. Mini pics in spoiler so I don't longcat. 

  Hide contents

battlemaster_front.thumb.jpeg.09dcbbd1fdd3462c6ce19ab8cab91618.jpegbattlemaster2.thumb.jpeg.1a7c7dc2e45e2e72fc58b6cd7ebd416d.jpegbattlemaster1.thumb.jpeg.7ec1361ec0128fae88212531b07d55bb.jpeg

Bonus points if anyone can ID this mech :D

Been awhile but I'll go with War Hammer, but hands may be different--more like guns.  

Edited by Mdhorn
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On 4/10/2023 at 10:06 PM, Captainant said:

The very same! 

The SLA thing is basically everyone but especially Chinese manufacturers like Elegoo and Creality - and they're only like $250 for an excellent resin printer! It's nuts.

There's a huge growth of novel printer designs, Creality put out a wild printer that has a belt for a print bed, and the print head is on a 45 degree axis relative to the print surface. It has an infinite Z axis to print with!

I've been doing this long enough that I forget that about half of the patents I've ever worked on are expired, not including those expired prematurely via nonpayment of fees.  That Israeli outfit's initial patents probably expired 10 years ago.

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9 hours ago, Mdhorn said:

Been awhile but I'll go with War Hammer, but hands may be different--more like guns.  

Close, but I should print a Warhammer next now that you mention it...

Spoiler

It's a Battlemaster BLR-1G!

 

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Posted (edited)

Minor bump update to my 3D printing journey: I've settled on using PETG primarily since it doesn't put out any VOCs when printing, and my printer is in my office so that's that lol. Only challenge is that PETG is a much fussier material than PLA to get clean results with, and most of my prints have some blobbing and minor stringing.

I did some googling, and apparently I need to turn off the "slow down for overhangs" setting in my slicer and that'll fix it? Hope it'll work! Ive been trying to print Prusa's new rocket engine model and the print fails when it gets to the fine details on thin connections

edit: that did it, plus some cooling fan tuning!

 

 

Edited by Captainant
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  • 1 month later...

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