Sunday, December 19, 2010

3D print from start to finish

Though similar videos exist on the internet, I wanted to document the full printing cycle of my repstrap printer. A 40 minute print condensed into 4 minutes:


The final object is here:



From the video a few issues with printing can be seen which I hope to work on improving in the future:
  • Speed. The printer is not very fast. Increasing the speed is certainly possible, but I need to make sure I have enough spare parts to repair the printer if I break it before I attempt to do that.
  • PLA dripping out after the extruder motor stops. It can be observed that after the test extrusion, when I have removed the extruded plastic hanging from the nozzle, that melted PLA drips out. This results in blobs on printed objects which should not be necessary.
  • The first few centimeters of printing did not work. This could be related to the previous issue: plastic has been dripping out and pressure has to be build up before there is a constant flow of plastic.

This object can be found at thingiverse here and is my favorite test object which has been printed quite a few times in different materials and different sizes.

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