Jeff's printer has arrived

Well here is the redesign a lot less plastic and easier to print no support at all
Works really well so far installation is best if you go in from behind the motor slide it and make sure the wires are underneath the arm and you should be all set It doesn't inhibit the movement the wires need to make as the bed moves forward and back just how far they can go up this prevents potential interference with the z axis limit switch

 

well my latest print was a lithograph of Half Dome in Yosemite not sure if the settings are off when the litho was created or if there are magical printer settings I don't know about yet Not sure if I like this so far but maybe I'll tweak with things and try again

 

Well I am moving into another PLA filament glow in the dark looking pretty interesting so far anyone have some good ideas for glow in the dark items if so let me know I want to try them out. First thing gonna have to play around with the extruding temp not liking the 190/180 setup I currently use for Red PLA

 

Well being honest here this is my first printer as well but I can try. I am sure you already saw the post I made to you about locking that nut down if not go read that it tells you why it needs to be loose. What is the issue you are having with rounded objects are you using supports. That is a good thing to try next all of mine have been mostly flat. a sphere hmm good plan for tomorrow. I don't know if this answers your question but I will be glad to share what I do know or find out as always

 

One thing I just thought of would be to print something like this

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:29429

do it with no supports and if you wnat to be extra bold try it with 0% infill to make it hollow
it is a simple pyramid but if you do it without supports you can see how your printer handles angles if everything works out in this print all four sides should meet at the same time if they dont then something is off and it may give you a good indications as to where to look. What are the dimensions when you print a 15mm cube with 100% infill if it is not close to 15.0 then you may need to do some adjusting and I can help you in that area bit also. If you haven't printed these two items before do it and see what your baseline is. The cube will give you good solid information you can work with the pyramid is a more subtle calibration I got mine xyz done first and then looked at finetuning things but when I did the pyramid it came out very very good then I had the issue with the wires and it screwed up my axis levels. I would print the cube again if you already did again once to get fresh info it is a good place to start if you see issues in other things as well, Let me know Ill be here.

 

just got a little bonus on my failed cuborg print and my Yosemite print it turns out that the Yosemite print is 4x4 which is the same size as one of the dividers for the cuborg i toose dthe Yosemite print in my prints container (the cuborg base cube) and lo and behold it went almost perfectly in one of the divider slots. so I actively placed in into a slote and it fit great as you can see in this pic

 

Jeff, try printing it again, but print it vertical instead of laying down. I don't know why the thinigiverse customizer lays them flat on the plate, but even at 200 micron resolution, these look way bettter standing up.
Use a brim of a few millimeters to give it a little bit of support so it doesn't tip over.

 

Thanks Matt after seeing that transformation vid I will definitely be trying again it just kept getting better and better and better.

 

Well I am smiling and printing again at this point I am about to complete my first print after getting my issues resolved. By the looks of this single print which is better than anything else I printed, I can hopefully start to believe that the road will be smooth again in th printing world. This issues were both simple thing but when combined they created a whole mess of other very confusing things.

As I said I think I am on a good track and think I got it all resolved working with Cambo , Harry and Coby to try and figure it out.

Now my print surface is the birchwood the PCB heater and the blue tape and I am only using PLA at this point
so my first prints went alright and then they just stopped working nothing could be set up properly. it looked as if I had a clogged nozzle because I could see the gears turn but no filament came out.during a print but extruded normally during a print it would start and stop for no visible reason I could see tore open the hot end and made sure it was clean and not melted or anything like that the PEEK was all good the PTFE tube was in good shape. If I opened up where you put the filament in I saw dust and powder on the hobbed bolt thought that may be getting clogged and simply letting the filament slip but that dust just blew out nice and clean next print same start and stop checked both side of teh xaxis to make sure the z stop switch was being activated at the right time and that the bed was level using the business card on each side. couldn't think of anything else.

During a large print I saw a pattern forming and what it was is that I had high and low spots on the bed not just level along x and y but just high and low all over and that was the biggest issue when I tried to get the bed level with the business cards I just made things worse which is why everything went to crap so fast.

The solution was to take a single reading right in the middle of the bed since that is where most prints would be printed anyway used that and then with Cambos help we I installed his design for making the z stop much more reliant and adjustable not it is stationary and you do the adjustments with a screw any way the single measurement for the bedlevelness and the zstop adjust allowed my to fine tune everything and as long as my print are in that smaller area I should be fine until I get my boro and heater to utilize a more stable bed.

So that is what I saw happen and how it was resolved.

My first print after this was a Yoda head with a chin support and it was added by the author because he said without the edges of his chin seem t o be rough and with it it was a lot better. It is printed in the White Glow-in-the-Dark PLA
at 1.5 scale at 250microns I originally thought it was going to be finished at 7:30 but it was not.

Hey I am not complaining the quality of this print blows way anything else I printed. It is so close to being done that I have to wait to post an image but it is not disappointing in any way.

I am just very happy to be back in the high quality printing area. For a while I was not too happy. In my next post I will have the finished print and will post a pic.

 

here he is the wrinkles in the skin eyelids AMAZING

 

OK back in the game now and I have to share some recent cool prints I had the last was one was my icon the tesseract
I printed it at 200 microns at 1/2 scale with no support using RED PLA and hairspray on glass to hold it down turned out really well. You can roll it like dice and it comes up looking different each time because of the sides is has and the viewpoint you see it in it is kind of fun to do. A neat gift would be to simply place this on a slowly rotating disk so you could see it changing all the time and then just flip it to a new side every now and then. You should really give this a shot.
I actually wrote an instructable here on how to draw one which you can easily do in a cad program

Here is the instructable link :

http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-draw-a-2-D-representation-of-a-X-Dimensiona/

you should give this a try in your favorite cad program it really is not that hard

I will also supply the stl file

here are some interesting pics floating cubes and rectangles and such

 

The other one I did was the cable chain segment that is my own design and is neat because it can be made into the normal cable chain that bends in one direction and stays flat in the other BUT you can also flip a single link around and it changes the direction of the bend. by alternating the orientation of the links the chain becomes rigid in both directions and the really neat part is you can add this to wiring without having to feed it through which would mean having it disconnected on one side this has a cover that SNAPS into place so you can position the cable chain around the wire while it is in place. It is under projects and you can see more images there as well

http://forums.robo3dprinter.com/index.php?threads/cable-chain-link-reversable-loadable-lockable.901/

 

I would like to second what Cambo said. You're coming up with some spectacular prints Jeff!

 

Thanks guys I think I just figured out one of my latest issues and that was too much stringing not sure if it the RED PLA but have heard it has a problem with stringing not sure where though. My solution was to go back to an older setting I had prior to my last printer issue I have tried multiple settings over the past few week I have migrated to the MAC version because I think there was something going on with the driver that was suggested at least with my system so when I setup everything on the MAC I went with the defaults, had the stringing issues and then searched my old profiles and found one significant difference. Now this may not help on your setup but at least look and see it may help.

It was my speed settings

they may seemed bumped up a bit but I would say 80-90% of the stringing I saw prior to this change are now gone.


ON the MAC these were the default speed settings then you will see mine and then the difference.

Perimeters-------------30mm---50mm---20mm change faster
Small Perimeters------30mm---50mm---20mm change faster
External perimeters---70%------70%-----no change
Infill---------------------60mm---50mm---10mm change slower
Solid Infill--------------60mm---50mm---10mm change slower
Top solid infill----------50mm---30mm---20mm change slower
Support Material-------60mm---60mm---no change
Bridges------------------60mm---50mm---10mm change slower
Gap Fill------------------20mm---45mm---25mm change faster



Travel-------------------130mm----145mm---10mm change faster

I hope this works for you with the drastic changes i saw I would really focus on this area I tried several other things temp retraction but none of it had the affect I saw with these changes.

Good luck and remember it may not be exactly my settings that fix your stringing issues... but it may be close.

 

glad you like it it would be cool on a USB powered rotating platter that shouldn't be to hard to set up. That looks full size how long did it take to print probably longer than it took me to design it.