3D Printing Archives - Page 6 of 7

February 6, 2018February 19, 2018

Finishing the surface of 3D Models

Over Christmas I had 3D printed a clock frame for my granddaughter’s birthday. The size ended up being three separate prints which I later glued together. All three prints were done ‘face down’ on the Sindoh bed and all printed on a raft. Once the raft had been removed the finish was not very elegant as it showed the striations of the raft on what would be the viewed surface. The print was in PLA and I initially did some tests on scrap prints to see if I could rub a surface down. This was not an ideal approach and I was not too keen to start on the clock in this manner.

Next idea was to use Gorilla twin pack glue cut with Meths. This created a very runny adhesive mix that could be brushed onto the surface of the print. Surprisingly enough despite being ‘modified’ the glue went off and was quite hard to the touch. It did not rub down all that well.

Reading up on the net there is a product called XTC-3D which is made just for this purpose. It is expensive but does stretch a long way in use. It is a twin pack mix in 2:1 ratio and once mixed it has a setting time of around 20 minutes so you need to get your act together and be well prepared. The makers recommend using a wide foam brush to apply the compound. This was quite good in that it ‘scraped’ across the tops of the striations and the filler settled like levelling compound does on a floor.

I left it to harden off overnight and then rubbed down wet with 400 grit paper on a flat surface. This kept the dust damped. The finish was excellent. I then undercoated and glossed with acrylic spray paint.

The final clock frame looked very good with no obvious signs of the printing artefacts. While pricey, I would recommend the XTC-3D product for this purpose.

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December 24, 2017February 19, 2018

I’m not saying our kids are alcoholics …

But this was a nice exercise in Fusion 360 and Sindoh printing and provided some simple UNO winner prizes. (Yes we always play at Christmas and it can get very bloody …).

The challenging part was wrapping their names round the body and I am indebted to John at NYC CNC for his video on putting text on a cylinder (Fusion Friday FF104). Editing the names was not quite so simple – the clue is to turn the body off so you can get at the text which sits in a different plane.

Happy Christmas to anyone who reads my stuff. More in the New Year and hopefully less Haimer probe breakages.

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December 14, 2017February 24, 2018

Laser Centring Tool for Tormach Tooling System

Frustrated by not being able to use my Myford Mill Laser Centring tool on my Tormach PCNC440 I have done a redesign using Fusion 360 and 3D printing.

Tormach, Fusion360 — Concept View of Laser Centring for Tormach TTS

Read about it here ……

Disclaimer : – This post and many others on my website feature references to Tormach and its products. I have no connection to Tormach Inc financially, commercially or otherwise. I acknowledge that Tormach®, Tormach Tooling System®, TTS® and PathPilot® are all registered trade marks of Tormach Inc.

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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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