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Working on some clamps

Discussion in 'Show and Tell' started by OutsourcedGuru, Jun 23, 2017.

  1. OutsourcedGuru

    OutsourcedGuru Active Member

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    Halfway done on these bed clamps. Printed these in the white PLA last night (12 hours) and the modified test C-clamp bodies are on the printer now, running those in black carbon fiber PLA. Although I used the medium quality profile in Cura, I can't tell much of a trade-off from the ultra-high, to be honest.

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  2. OutsourcedGuru

    OutsourcedGuru Active Member

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    Not so successful (yet) on the carbon fiber PLA. Went maybe 80% through the job without a hitch and then went psycho at the end. This was a test print to see which orientation worked out the best but I still managed to get a usable part out of the horizontal one, regardless of the snafu.

    Next attempt, dropped the vertically-oriented one and it failed even sooner this time.

    Fourth attempt's now printing. Think I've dialed in the custom temperature from 190°C up to 203°C, noting that the smoothed top of the raft was a thing of beauty (shiny smooth) so I'm guessing this is the happy temp for the carbon fiber PLA. In fact, I may end up tweaking the standard PLA, using this same litmus test. It's possible that I've been printing too low with the defaults and didn't know it.

    I learned that if you set the target hotend temperature before starting the job, it's overridden by the new job's settings. I learned that if you set the hotend temp before the "tell" has finished printing, it's overridden. You have to set the hotend temp after the tell is down so that it's not overridden with the default. Also, if you pause/resume then the default temperature is re-instated as well. So you have to watch this like a hawk.

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    Of course, there will be two times when using these clamps will cause troubles: at the end of the job when the printer is trying to home the bed (crunch), at the beginning of the job when the head assembly can't clear the top of that clamp at the back (crunch). So the thought would be that I'd pause the job a half inch above the bed, add the clamps, resume, pause again right before the job is finished, remove the clamps, resume.
     
  3. mark tomlinson

    mark tomlinson ༼ つ ◕_ ◕ ༽つ
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    New filament always has me printing little test models (like deprime) to find the happy place for the temperature.
     
  4. OutsourcedGuru

    OutsourcedGuru Active Member

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    Btw, I did that cutout in the C-part of the clamp (at the top) using a boolean object cutting... from an STL mesh file... in Autodesk Fusion 360. They hide the Mesh-to-BRep menu item from you as an Easter Egg—you have to turn off journaling (Time Line) in order to see the option. Of course, Autodesk choked on the nearly 50,000 faces so it took fifteen minutes to convert, then another fifteen to do the chop, but it finally came through in the end. Chopped part with a nice needle-nose finish there on the working side and a graceful sweep to it which coincides with the head assembly shape.

    And also, the carbon fiber's pretty tough stuff. It took a fair bit of coaxing to remove the supports.
     
  5. OutsourcedGuru

    OutsourcedGuru Active Member

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    And a perfect part, very hard, (more effort required to remove the supports inside the threading), zero noticeable deformation when cranking the screw all the way into that clamp, shiny surface on the top of the raft, fits the screw threads after some initial force, no bottom thread-loss when separating from the raft like last time.

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  6. BeefHealer

    BeefHealer New Member

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    Nice clamps what are you using them for and do you have the stl to post by any chance?
     

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