printing filled up spaces

Hi,

I saw in one of the video's of one of the plastic printers that it fills up spaces by printing under an angle (X/Y plane).

Do all printers do this, or are there also models that just fill up spaces solely on the X or Y axis?

Reason why I ask is that when filling up spaces under an angle, you're wearing out both X and Y plane rotors and table.
By filling up just using one axis you'd probably print faster, and wear out the table less.


If for reasons of fault-lines in the plastic (where the structure is weakened by placing parallel layer upon layer of plastic) it's better to fill the object with angled lines; then it might be better to angle the object softwarematically, before printing, and just fill it up by letting only the X or Y motor of the table handle the movement.

You can configure Skeinforge to slice in any direction. The default is 45 degrees.

If you make it parallel to the sides of a rectangular object then you end up with a gap at one edge unless the object is exactly a multiple of the filament width long. With diagonal infill you only get tiny gap in one corner if the diagonal is not an exact multiple of the filament width.

Yes you could rotate the object 45 degrees and use horizontal and vertical infill. I am not sure it saves any wear though because the total length of the filament will be the same to fill a given area.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/03/2011 10:37AM by nophead.

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[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]

I understand, but what I'm saying is, if you rotate the design, you'll increase wear on only one engine, while keeping the design normal will ballast and wear both engines of the table.

The infill rotates by 90 degrees each layer (again this can be changed in SF). So with horizontal and vertical infill each motor moves half the length of the infill averaged over two layers.

With diagonal infill each motor goes 70% of the distance at 70% of the speed. So they do go a bit further on average, but more slowly so hard to say what effect it would have on wear. Stepper motors and ball bearings last a very long time so wear is not really an issue unless you use bushings.

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[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]

That's a good argument, and since the motors and bearings seemingly are made to last, I presume it's a non-issue here.

I've looked at many prototype designs, of many items, and most of the time they can be used sparingly.
But while looking around, I found, that there are several people running these machines 24/7 weeks on end, so I presume that the parts will outlast a normal person's pc, if used sparingly.

I have run my Mendel 24/7 since March 2010. The motors and bearings are all fine. The rods have slight flats on them but I rotated them all recently so the used surface is good as new again.

Things that have worn out were :

The X belt every 200 hours until I switched to the new X axis design and then never again. My Z motor pulley a long time ago, but that was made from PLA and got too hot. My ABS Y motor pulley failed recently.

The bed mounts sheared from the y 180 brackets and I replaced them with a single mount in the middle. That also failed recently when my wife was brutal getting the parts off the bed.

I have got through several of the Wade's gears and a few Wade's extruder blocks and idler brackets and one carriage.

As I have a second machine the plastic parts are not a problem. I just print another. If you only have one machine it is a good idea to print a set of spares for all these parts. Most people would run their machines a lot less and would get many years of life.

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[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]

I'm finding reprapped objects somewhat annoyingly anisotropic as-is, with my poorly calibrated machine I don't entirely trust Z-layers not to delaminate under extreme conditions. Another thing is that with my extruder, it takes a second or two for extrusion to settle down and become reliable per-layer due to an annoyingly large melt volume. I'm wondering if I tried printing not at 45 degrees there would be more tendency for errors to accumulate somewhere in the object and cause weakness. As for reliability, I think printing in mostly X or Y would at most reduce the bearing travel distances by sqrt(2) which is probably not sufficient to make up for possible weaknesses in that approach.

What about printing the horizontal walls of a square in X motion, and vertical walls in Y-only motion?

I mean, it can't get any better than that I suppose!