Topsy's Printer! (Some pics NSFW-ish)

haha, true that.

I tried my 0.25mm nozzle for a while, inconsistent under and over extrusion was the order of the day, i think it's just far less tolerant of bad settings, poor filament and variable feed rates, ie, when the extruder tries to push harder, the flow rate of plastic doesn't catch up linearly, plus temperatures need to be much higher to keep the flow going. I had to print at 210C. I may try again with the travel rates all set to the same speed, probably 30-40mm/s and no z-lift.

I'm back to the 0.4 nozzle, but I'm happily printing with 0.1mm layer height, which is very fine already and allows for quite serious overhang/undercuts. The 0.25mm nozzle wont give you much of that.

I spent a good hour last night just tweaking my dodgey temporary 'unheated' glass bed to be super level. Wow, what a diffrence, also tried hairspray for the first time. Will pretty much always use it now as it means the 'bare' glass (with just a swab of hairspray) holds nicely.
I'm using a non-aerosol hairspray with only about 4 ingredients, it works fine for PLA, but i'm sure i'll need something more serious for ABS. I also don't actually spray it on, too messy. I just used a makeup sponge and about 10 drops of hairspray to wipe over the glass. Neat.

 

I've been printing with hairspray and I use to clean the bed after a certain time till the glass was shiny clean and laid down a fresh coat of hairspray. But lately I got a little lazy and left the spray on. The bed gets a little whitish from the heated hairspray left on, but I have been able to keep printing one model one after another without having to worry about the PLA will stick or not. It sticks for many prints without worry.


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I find just scraping of the excess with the rasor scraper is sufficient If its getting messy.
Whatever residue remains is re-combined with the new wet layer.
It works so well and is so easy. I don't know why anyone would bother with tape anymore.

 

lol I have cleaned my glass once, months ago. I spray on a new layer of hair spray and just print. Sometimes I'll scrape it a bit but mostly to remove bits of skirt or whatever that are stuck on. Unless you're doing under 0.1mm layer height prints and don't have your first layer set to something thicker (but really, no reason to do that I can think of), it's not a problem.

 

Just wandering by to show off a big project I've been working on for the past month: Making a tiny, fully-poseable kitty:






Not -quite- done as there's some things that still need tweaking... When finished, I'll probably print copies through Shapeways as their White Strong & Flexible material looks perfect for this - but having my Robo to work on the prototype has been fantastic... Not sure how much it'd cost to get printed through Shapeways but I've -maybe- spent 5 euros in materials printing various attempts and making tweaks to the design.

 

Nice!


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