3D Printing Archives - Page 7 of 7

November 28, 2017February 19, 2018

Sindoh 3DWOX DP200 Raft Printing Problem

My close friend in France also has a Sindoh 3DWOX DP200 3D printer. We bought them at a similar time. He has probably been a busier user of the machine. He has designed and making a very complex camera mount for tracking celestial objects. He is using an Arduino as the controller and has never written code before. He is having fun and keeping his brain stimulated.

A few weeks ago he reported that the raft that the machine was laying down before printing objects was not uniform and had ‘holes’ in it. The result was that the PLA being extruded for the object being printed, would droop down into the void in the raft and spoil the finish of the object while also making it hard to separate from the raft afterwards.

We swapped ideas remotely about what might be the cause and tried various tests and experiments but to no avail.

As it happened a few days ago we were travelling down into France and calling in to see him for lunch so I had a chance to see the problem first hand. More head scratching until …. I had the printer bed in my hand near the window and the sunlight caught the surface of the plastic laminated to the metal bed. My eye caught a slight bubble in the plastic surface where the adhesive bonding the plastic to the metal had presumably parted company. This was the problem ! The air bubble, small though it was, was causing a discontinuity in the bed temperature profile leading to the PLA not flowing from the nozzle correctly.

We ran a print and put the object on a different area of the bed where there was no bubbling or scratches and the raft and the print were good.

New bed plate ordered ….

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November 28, 2017February 19, 2018

Black Saturday and a Napkin Ring

Had a bad day on Saturday. I was milling a small tooling plate on the PCNC440 and got distracted. Result was a coolant puddle migrating into the bottom of the Tormach keyboard followed by a broken Haimer tip. Doom and and major gloom. The keyboard was a write off as the fluid had got into the capacitive keyboard laminated sheets.

As it turned out a new keyboard was much cheaper to buy from Amazon than import another one from Tormach being only GBP6 and the Haimer tip while a bit more expensive was imported from Germany via Amazon.

I was in the process of trying to work out why the Z settings appeared to be changing while drilling the matrix of holes on the tooling plate. The drill bit length was still the same figure as entered in the offset tooling table but the hole depth had reduced. I think it might be the Tormach Tooling Collet not being fully seated into the spindle and it had jumped home. Having just installed a new air compressor for the Fog Buster and the tool changer, it could be the air pressure was a bit low and not fully opening the R8 collet. As soon as the new Haimer tip arrives I will get back to it.

While ‘off-air’ so to speak I have been doing some 3D modelling on Fusion 360 to create some home grown Christmas gifts for the kids. First one off is a customised napkin ring with a brass ring at each end. The exercise taught me how to form text around a circular body (thanks to John at NYC CNC for the demo video). Not very sexy but functional.

sindoh, Fusion 360, kennedy power hacksaw — 3D created napkin ring designed in Fusion 360 and printed using Sindoh 3DWOX and embellished with two brass rings

I struggled with cutting the brass rings and was about to design them out and go to all PLA when I had the idea to use the Kennedy Power Hacksaw like a bacon slicer to cut off thin circular shims of brass from a 2″ tube. It worked well, was more efficient on waste than parting off in the lathe and gave a consistently wide slice.

Next request is for customised wine bottle stoppers. Not sure wine bottles stay unfinished long enough in our house to justify this but let’s see what Fusion can deliver for the kids.

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September 10, 2017February 19, 2018

France Visit, Golf at Brive and a Shumatech DRO350 connection pod

We have had a few days in France to chill out and cut the grass …. lots of grass. The first weekend was spent in Vichy supporting our son at the IronMan event. It was very hot but he did well, coming 7th in his age group.

Once back at our home in the Lot we had a few friends and family drop in to visit which was nice. Euro exchange rate is awful, almost parity with GBP, so things are a bit more expensive than normal.

Brive Golf Course

Our son arrived and he also plays golf so we played Souillac Country Club course and a few days later decided to try the Brive Municipal course. As members at Souillac we got a discount at Brive from the normal EUR40 for 18 holes down to EUR32 which was worth having. The Brive course is long and runs along a valley with a stream running through. Lots of holes with water as a result. The weather was warm so we drooped quite badly after the half way point. Between us we lost quite a few balls. Given the choice I think we would all prefer Brive over SGCC.

Always things to do but Fusion 360 connects

Done quite a few jobs about the place while here and also some home workshop related activity. One of the many things that is good about Fusion 360 is the cloud storage so I could log on in France as if sat at home. We get a 9Mbps connection in the village which for rural France is very fast so connecting to Fusion 360 is no problem.

Shumatech DRO350 Pod

I bought a ShumaTech DRO350 readout kit for my Myford Super 7 before we came out. It is a well thought out kit but sadly the originator of the product no longer seems to be around and promised later versions never appeared. Wild Horse Innovations are the US outlet and they are promising a replacement kit some time in the future. The UK source is Model Engineering Digital Workshop. There are allegedly electrical noise issues with the product and looking at the PCB layout I can see why but I have yet to power it up.

The kit comes with a box with all the connections out of the back face which is not ideal for mounting over the Myford Super 7. My DROs are cheap Chinese caliper devices and have RJ11 connectors on them which is not compatible with the kit connectors. Some of my time here in France has been spent designing a pod in Fusion 360 to fit on the end of the readout box to allow the connections to come off the end. Looking forward to getting home to run the 3D print of the pod and get the project up and running and of course getting back to the Tormach 440.

shumatech 350, DRO — DRO350 connection pod for RJ11 devices