Cut, Print!

Got the printer for work and the first projects were work-related. Protective caps (that we could have ordered from Uline, but it made a good starter project). And then curtain guides, which we couldn't find anywhere to order and the existing ones were...poorly designed.

I learned enough of FreeCAD to get those parts made, and even revise them (despite being parametric, there are operations in FreeCAD that only look reversible but in practice things break if you try.) And, yes, ordinary PLA was plenty strong enough.

Although I am tempted to try out ABS, metal-fill, and of course nylon carbon-fibre prints (or for the absolutely crazy, do a lost PLA casting in metal!) Have to put in an all-metal hot end, though, plus probably stainless steel nozzle.

I've been exploring a different aspect of the machine. How close can you come to the kind of detail and smoothness needed for gaming miniatures? Well, these are the current experiments:

The models were off Thingiverse and not terribly detailed to start with, but I lost almost nothing even printing with the stock nozzle and a mere .08 layer height (can go down as fine as .04 with the current nozzle but that of course takes twice as long to print.)

(The other tricks are reduced line thickness, reduced speed, possibly increased extrusion. And then lower the temp a little to reduce stringing.)

The upside to a resin printer for this sort of thing is with FDM you pay for footprint. The wider the base of the model, the longer it takes. With resin, the entire build plate prints and the time factor is entirely how many layers are involved.

Plus stringing. I printed the curtain supports sixteen at a time, the print head hopping from one to the next. Stringing wasn't bad on those but I sometimes lost half a batch when one got knocked off the build plate and then mangled several others with sticky debris.

The big print for me so far is a smart phone stand. Now that I can eat inside again I'm taking the phone to work at the cafe over weekend brunch. Get a ton of writing done...most of the day's writing between the first coffee and the last bit of fruit, in fact.

So it worked but it was boring so I decided to make the Iphonekythera Mechanism; paint it up like it was some intricate bit of ancient bronze mechanism that had been at the bottom of the Aegean for hundreds of years. Overdid it a bit. Eventually it worked again but one of the processes warped the base annoyingly.

(So that's Dremel distressing, wood putty, texturing with the stuff we put on floors to control dust during sweep-up, Rustoleum hammered finish, some new Golden brand high-flow acrylic tints, a rubbing with bronze powder to put raw metal back in the working surfaces and general highlights.)