Anyone know much about 3d printers?

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gnat
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Re: Anyone know much about 3d printers?

Post by gnat » Sat Mar 02, 2019 12:53 pm

Yeah the texture the guy added really makes them nice. Not only does it look better, but it makes the print layering less obvious too. Other available models are "smooth" surfaces and the official toys are smooth and painted to look textured.

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5chn3ll
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Re: Anyone know much about 3d printers?

Post by 5chn3ll » Sun Mar 03, 2019 10:41 am

Yeah, well f**k you.


:D
32wildbilly wrote: Sat Mar 02, 2019 5:35 am
5chn3ll wrote: Fri Mar 01, 2019 4:22 pm That's funny - I printed some of the same Minecraft swag for one of my nephews a year or so ago. Blew his mind.
...and you are a good Uncle.

I'm beginning to think both of you and gnat's forum personalities are not accurate. :lol:

Understeer: You will hit the wall with the front end.
Oversteer: You will hit the wall with the rear end.
Horsepower: How hard you will hit the wall.
Torque: How far you will move the wall.

Gone hunting with Alec Baldwin and Dick Cheney. Back soon.

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5chn3ll
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Re: Anyone know much about 3d printers?

Post by 5chn3ll » Sun Mar 03, 2019 10:42 am

Thingiverse is the shit. Super handy for those of us who just pretend to be smart.

Understeer: You will hit the wall with the front end.
Oversteer: You will hit the wall with the rear end.
Horsepower: How hard you will hit the wall.
Torque: How far you will move the wall.

Gone hunting with Alec Baldwin and Dick Cheney. Back soon.

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gnat
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Re: Anyone know much about 3d printers?

Post by gnat » Sun Mar 03, 2019 10:59 am

5chn3ll wrote: Sun Mar 03, 2019 10:42 am Thingiverse is the shit. Super handy for those of us who just pretend to be smart.
No shit. The guy that did the Voltron did his take of old school Optimus Prime, Megatron, and Soundwave last month. He apparently whipped each out in 1.5 hours. I've spent ~2 hours a night for 3 weeks and counting trying to cut off Prime's head and scale it up to go with my giant Voltron head (which I have done almost nothing to finish :().

The cutting off and scaling aren't really the hard parts. I'm trying to slice parts off so I can print separately with different colors and carve it out for a battery and some LEDs to make his eyes glow.

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5chn3ll
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Re: Anyone know much about 3d printers?

Post by 5chn3ll » Sun Mar 03, 2019 11:02 am

Have you looked at the new 4-color rigs? I mean, if you NEED to print in color, you might as well do it right...

Understeer: You will hit the wall with the front end.
Oversteer: You will hit the wall with the rear end.
Horsepower: How hard you will hit the wall.
Torque: How far you will move the wall.

Gone hunting with Alec Baldwin and Dick Cheney. Back soon.

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32wildbilly
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Re: Anyone know much about 3d printers?

Post by 32wildbilly » Sun Mar 03, 2019 11:09 am

5chn3ll wrote: Sun Mar 03, 2019 10:41 am Yeah, well f**k you.

:D
32wildbilly wrote: Sat Mar 02, 2019 5:35 am
...and you are a good Uncle.

I'm beginning to think both of you and gnat's forum personalities are not accurate. :lol:
OH MY!! Perhaps I was inaccurate at least about one of you fine fellows... :lol:
Never gonna make you cry...

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gnat
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Re: Anyone know much about 3d printers?

Post by gnat » Sun Mar 03, 2019 11:27 am

5chn3ll wrote: Sun Mar 03, 2019 11:02 am Have you looked at the new 4-color rigs? I mean, if you NEED to print in color, you might as well do it right...
Prusa's MMU2 is 5 :P

I have it on order actually. Ordered it at the same time I ordered the printer. Original ship date was early Feb. Then early March. Currently it's mid April. There are some people claiming they ordered in Sept and are still waiting :?

I'm finding that multi-color printing with either the Palette or MMU is not all it's cracked up to be.

The first issue is that you have to do a lot of editing work to convert a single model into a multi-material print. It's not simply "paint this area".

The second issue is that there is a crap ton on waste in the purge process. Some cases will generate a purge block 2-3x the weight of your actual print. In addition to all that wasted material, that is also extra time and power being wasted too.

Even with the purging, you still get bleed between materials. Most of the time it's not noticable, but if you do white eyeballs with a black pupil you'll see the black bleeding into the white.

The units are also finicky with a lot of complaints about getting them to work and work consistently.

What I am just now learning is that you are also limited in your nozzle and layer sizes. So while I do most of my prints at a .1 height and I want to do Voltron v2 at .05 with my .25mm nozzle, the best I can apparently do with the MMU is .15 with a .4 nozzle :(

Complicating that last point is that you have to modify your extruder, so it's not just pulling it on or off depending on what you want to print.

At this point I'm having second thoughts and considering either canceling the order or letting it go through and then offer it up as a no waiting sale to someone else.

The upside of dealing with Prusa is that they have just released an update to both the printer and MMU and my MMU (whenever it comes) will come with the upgrades at no extra cost. They also sent out free upgrade vouchers (why not just ship them out?) to everyone that received their printer or MMU orders for a month prior to the update. Pretty good guys even if they do have some painful delay problems.

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5chn3ll
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Re: Anyone know much about 3d printers?

Post by 5chn3ll » Sun Mar 03, 2019 11:38 am

How is print bed adhesion and part warping? That's what is currently killing me with my Makerbot - the print quality is fine, but the temperature delta between the printhead and the build plate means that I have to raft ANYTHING with any mass that contacts the build plate - otherwise, it just curls up and pops off. Even with a raft, I have to spin parts to keep large hotspots from being printed - otherwise, it will keep going until the whole part warps up enough to collide with the extruder with varying but almost always time-consuming consequences.

It's getting old, both literally and figuratively...although between old AX paint paranoia and print bed prep work, I have developed some MAD blue tape skills.

Understeer: You will hit the wall with the front end.
Oversteer: You will hit the wall with the rear end.
Horsepower: How hard you will hit the wall.
Torque: How far you will move the wall.

Gone hunting with Alec Baldwin and Dick Cheney. Back soon.

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gnat
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Re: Anyone know much about 3d printers?

Post by gnat » Sun Mar 03, 2019 12:14 pm

Adhesion is AWESOME on the MK3. Shit just doesn't want to let go. The trick is that you have to keep it clean, but that is not hard at all.

You saw my bad Benchies, they were an adhesion issue. Under my office halogens I couldn't see anything, but when I hit the plate with my LED flash I suddenly saw the finger prints.

The first rule of their Flexible PEI sheet is to ignore all the prep rules you already know. The second rule to never touch the surface.

To fix my issues with Benchy I did the following:

1) Washed it with plain non-scented and non-good for your hands dish soap and a soft sponge.
2) Took it back to the printer wrapped in a towel so I wouldn't touch it and put it back on the bed.
3) Poured 100% acetone on it and wiped it down with a paper towel (again, just plain, no scents or other gimmicks).
4) Poured 91% IPA on it and wiped it down again with a paper towel.
5) Made my first successful Benchy.

I repeated 3 & 4 between every print for a week and washed it every couple of days. As I've gotten experience, however, now I simply wipe it down with the alcohol before I start a print. I don't remember the last time I gave it a bath and last night was the first time I hit it with acetone in probably a month or so as I was printing some tall thin parts (no support or rafts) and thought my adhesion was getting a little week (e.g. I popped all those Creepers off without flexing the plate). This morning I had to flex the plate to get the parts off, including the ones that were about 6" tall with maybe 10mm of surface area contact on the plate.

The flex plate also means that a spatula is almost never needed (did have to break it out for a terribly bad TPU attempt).

That's all for PLA. Different materials require different prep (windex for PETG, glue for TPU, etc...).

I read all the black magic around bed adhesion and was worried about that, but this has been zero trouble once I learned how to clean it properly.

Other than when I hit the wrong thing and screwed up my Z calibration (which turned out to be a good thing as I ended up dialing it in for even better printing) this thing has been a zero issue investment. I bought it pre-assembled rather than the kit since this was my first as I figured the extra couple hundred bucks was worth skipping any frustration. I still think that was a good call. I'd definitely recommend the printer regardless of if you are new or have been printing a long time. Good quality. Decent price. Good build area (210x250x210). Good support (professional and community).

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Re: Anyone know much about 3d printers?

Post by gnat » Sun Mar 03, 2019 5:19 pm

Here are some vids from printing the Creepers for you Schnelly.

Prep (seriously, this was it): https://video.nest.com/clip/2693a1a7621 ... 02d93f.mp4

Removal: https://video.nest.com/clip/d2510fc5a03 ... a1382a.mp4

Taking off the plate: https://video.nest.com/clip/a1bd0ee5c9f ... 40a3b0.mp4

You can get an idea about how the heads and pins didn't want to come off without some force. If I had just pulled the plate and flexed it they would have come right off. I wanted to leave the bodies in place for pictures.

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