Keith moved his Extruder circuit board to the outside of his bot for better filament viewing. I am always taking the sd card out all the time so this wouldn’t work for me, but I like the idea and his wire wrap is beautiful!!!
I’d previously mounted the extruder PCB up on the highest two screws of the extruder housing, placing it above the feeder face instead of covering it, but that was pretty fragile and I was constantly worrying about bumping it and snapping it off. This weekend I moved the extruder controller to its new permanent home on the right side of the CupCake in the empty space above the motherboard. It fits nicely and shares a mounting screw with the upper Z-axis endstop.
Vandebina found a way to turn MakeBotted objects into gold… well at least covered in gold! She did it at Miss Baltazar’s Laboratory at Metalab in Vienna. I asked her how she did it and this is what she said!
I demonstrated four different types of gilding a surface. The one with the makerbotted cup is a kind of oil gilding. You have to coat the surface with varnish or an oil-based gold size (oil/resin) that will dry and develop a tacky surface. The oil that i use is known as Mixtion. After the drying time (12 hours) you just have to apply the gold leaves. To protect the surface it can be painted with some acrylic finish, or whatever you want.
There are also other ways to gild the surface —> gilding milk as clay, it takes just 10-15 minutes to dry. The next weeks i will try to gild makerbotted things with galvanic method, the first tests failed. But i’m on it. heh!
Thanks Vandebina! Keep us posted with future experiments!
Robert Bowdidge discovered a cool way to make model train buildings!
I wondered if I could break up the long side pieces so that the top layer couldn’t pull across the piece to cause the warp. Back in SketchUp, I made the piece twice as deep, and cut some wedges out of the thickened back side perpendicular to the warping.
Nate True is an old buddy of mine from Seattle and shepard of the great site cre.ations.net. He’s hotrodded his extruder! Check it!
After some failures Wednesday and today, my dad and I came up with some fixes to the extruder that have made it work fantastically now.N
The first failure was the PTFE barrier bulging out and leaking ABS all over the place – we solved that by using a new PTFE barrier and surrounding it with a 1/2″ copper pipe slip joiner with a slot hacksawed lengthwise into it so that it could change size and slip around the barrier. Then we used hose clamps to clamp really hard down on the copper fitting so that it would not bulge out. There’s a heat sink on there too but we are not sure whether it’s really helping any. Sure looks cool though!
The other failure was the insulator retainer plate starting to crack due to the high pressures. I had the genius idea to put the screws right into the plastruder body, rather than using the plate at all, and was surprised to find out that it all fit together just fine that way. Now the tension is on three parallel plates of acrylic rather than bending a single plate of acrylic around a bend.
The last fix is one that I’ve had on for a long time, that’s the M6 nut around the heater barrel which makes sure the heater barrel is pushed into the PTFE barrier threads, rather than the barrier threads being the only thing holding the heater barrel on. I didn’t have an M6 nut so I just used pliers to make a makeshift nut out of very small brass tube. It works fine!
I post hoping others will find solutions to their extruder problems and that others will suggest more solutions.
Hive76 has been playing with heated build surfaces! Check it!
So tonight we realized that the 4″ putty knife we had been using to scrape off objects from the makerbot build platform was actually perfect for addressing BOTH of these problems. We put the putty knife between the heat and the build surface… The metal surface conducts the heat evenly to about 80% of the build surface now. So how do you pick up this hot stage? A huge bonus is that even though the stage is now too hot to hold at the edges, we have a sturdy handle that doesn’t interfere with printing!
Pleasant Hardware has been rocking it lately by hooking up an LCD screen to their MakerBot. Check it out and then click on the link below to go check out their other work, it’s great!
