I have a 12"x12" that I made from a large granite tile, its perfectly flat, I plan on expanding it out to 18"x18" using more of the granite tile. its perfectly flat and wont crack due to heat differential. as for the surface, I found that 5mil kapton works great, however i havent found a good solution for gluing it to the bed, perhaps a very thin epoxy with work well.by aduy - General
ive found that aluminum nozzles actually get larger over time because they essentially anneal once they are heated to operating temperature, espescially 7000 series alloys.by aduy - General
Basically whats happening is the new layer of plastic that's being laid down is hot and expanded, the top of the new layer cools faster than the bottom, because the bottom is insulated by the previous layer, and the top is being cooled by the air. This causes top to cool and contract, curling the edges upwards and ruining your print. There are two ways to solve this, use a fan to blow on the plasby aduy - General
oh ok cool ill give this a try! I just need to make a usb otg cable. ok so i made an otg cable, if you are making your own or have a motorola you need to have the cable powered as well. also the mouse works natively with android and is awesome, rat 7 + android = win.by aduy - General
Ive had my hot end water cooled for over a year, I had it leak once when i was taking the hoses off, the hoses fit over barbs and there is usually a clamp over the barb, originally it used metal clamps then I put on zipties instead. as long as the silicon tubing is rated for high temperature exposure it should be fine. my only concern is how thick the tubes are, they only need to be about 4mm thiby aduy - General
24v is better for running your steppers on, and you can set the max pwm value to 63 to use it on the hot end and heated bed, you would need to supply power to the arduino using a small 12v supply which could also power your fans.by aduy - Reprappers
no i wasnt being sarcastic, ive got an android sitting around that could be used to connect to my printer.by aduy - General
I pre-ordered the kraken hot end, and Im very excited, I already have a water cooled hot end so I should be able to provide some useful feedback on it.by aduy - General
you probably miswired the motors, or a wire is disconnected.by aduy - General
If you are having bed adhesion, abs juice works the best, on a kapton bed as hot as you can get it. infact regular pc will stick to bluetape coated in abs juice even when cold, but it will warp like nothing youve seen before, bringing the tape with it. you can see the print came out great it was clear and very strong, I used a thermocouple on my hot end and printed at 265c, however I found a gby aduy - General
the thermocouple I use has fiberglass insulation, its the same one that comes with a lot of mulitmeters.by aduy - General
I love it! ive been waiting for something like this for a long time.by aduy - General
it would be useful to make a filament sensor that could see how much filament was actually getting pushed into the extruder.by aduy - General
not sure if this relates but on my personal hot end ive noticed that I can extrude about 7mm/s of 1.75mm filament continiously, i can extrude upwards of 25mm/s in short bursts of about 15mm long, if i try to extrude faster than 7mm/s continously the hot end cannot heat the plastic fast enough for it to be extrueable. does anyone else have any data like this about the e3d hot end?by aduy - General
this was the piece i had that broke, I had kapton tape on it too.by aduy - General
while the design of that extruder does look nice, its really very overpriced and looks very heavy. sure if your using a makerbot thats a good price but for a reprap it just wont be feaseable. anyways about the oval filament, you could draw it round using a drawplate.by aduy - General
I've heard of people using borosillicate glass as it won't shatter as easily as regular glass. However if you can get polished granite tiles that are thin they work great as well. On my printer I use a 1/2 *12*12" granite tile it retains the heat very well, and won't ever crack due to uneven heating like glass.by aduy - General
I disagree, 1.75mm for abs gets kinked pretty easily and is harder to grip than 3mm.by aduy - General
Im a goldsmith, I know a thing or two about the properties of gold and a few of its alloys, 14k, 18k, 22k. I could get some 24k gold casting grain, then cast it into an ingot, then mill it down into 1.75mm wire, probably about 2 feet per ounce, then use a very high temp hot end to print it out in the air. however 24k gold melts at something like 1200c, and you would need to heat the chamber to abby aduy - General
yeah i thought of that, but then i thought of the laser and liked it better, although i have almost no experience with high powered lasers. the issue with the small duct is it would have to metal, and fairly flexible unless the head is stationary. they do make some of these though, and you would ideally need to insulate the outside of it. I measured the output of the hot air at 98c on low feedinby aduy - General
my setup on my printer has a space heaters output running through a tube which is then pointed at the nozzle, however the output is stationary and the nozzle moves. i wonder if you could use a high powered laser pointed at the spot right below the nozzle if that would allow it to heat the plastic enough.by aduy - General
you would need a 7 stepper board or 6 with an external driver. although it would be more intelligent to just use one driver that could switch which motor it was controlling, because you never use more than one extruder at a time. also your board should have 4 heater cartridge outputs.by aduy - General
i believe the patents expire 17 years after the submission date, not completely sure though. also if they do end up suing and buying up these companies, they will have a monopoly on 3d printing, which is a crime in the united states.by aduy - General
did makerbot not use a slicer that had "porous infill" and dont they also use a heated bed and build chamber.by aduy - General
i couldnt help but notice that your extruders are actually wrapping the filament around the drive gear. im working on an extruder that does this, but with a 2" wheel so it wont break pla.by aduy - General
well actually you can set the acceleration and jerk pretty high, my machine has 15 tooth gt2 pulleys and 2 motors per axis, the motors are about 4.5kgcm, so it can push the head around with about 19kg of force roughly, not accounting for friction and also not accounting for loss of torque at speeds. I set my jerk at 100 and acceleration at 3000, but my frame is very rigid and its a corexy configuby aduy - General
a while back i read an article about stepper motor windings, if you have an 8 wire stepper motor you can wire up the motor a few different ways. and any 6 wire motor can be converted to an 8 wire motor with a soldering iron some wire and a razor blade. anyways if you rewire the motor into the parallel configuration you can lower the inductance value to 1/4. basically you get 4 times the max speedby aduy - General
does anyone know the max temp you can print pc abs with? With pc i had good results printing 30mm/s at 280c when it was dried for 8 hours, when i sped it up I noticed the pc came out cloudy and not fully melted. keep in mind that i have a water cooled hot end so the transition zone is cold and only the nozzle is hot. an e3d hot end might be better for this stuff since it is all metal. with theirby aduy - General
this can be done with solder, or pure gold.by aduy - General
ive got some of the ultimachine pc, and some of the prints came out fantastic, the plastic has to be freshly dried for it to bond well, basically it needs 4 hours in a 250f oven or more, then you need to print with it right away, the moisture causes it to become foggy and bond very poorly.by aduy - General