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Anyone here do 3D printing?

I bought myself an Anet ( ) A8 a few weeks ago. One half-way successful test print and one blown mainboard later, I think I'm back in business I'm getting better results than this, anyway:

I've done a bit with a Dremel printer. Unfortunately, it died and is on its way to be repaired now. One interesting thing I did was to print some aftermarket parts to allow me to use generic filament spools instead of the 3x price oddball Dremel spools.

One cool thing I've seen done is 3d printing a SpaceX Falcon 9 model(not me, yet anyway).

bhmbaglock wrote:One interesting thing I did was to print some aftermarket parts to allow me to use generic filament spools instead of the 3x price oddball Dremel spools.

Yep, sometimes it seems that the main reason for having a 3D printer is to print upgrades for your 3D printer But proprietary filament blows.

This evening I've finally managed to get a near-flawless print of one of the test files. I have no idea how big the thing is supposed to be, but the variation between bits that should be the same is surprisingly small, in the region of 0.05mm. The X and Y axes aren't perfectly square, though they're well under a degree off by the looks of it.

That Falcon 9 is nice. Thinking about aviation, one thing I really want to try is printing onto transparencies/acetates; if the filament will stick to it, that seems like a quick way of getting some glass terminal buildings

Printed a cable chain/guide for the Y axis overnight, It's a bit rough but looks like it'll do the job:



I'm starting to dabble with Onshape for parts design, and having fun with it, although it thinks in a different way to the CAD stuff I did in college nearly 20 years ago (yikes). The charger cable was always popping out of my phone, and no amount of cleaning the socket helped, so I designed and printed a sleeve that goes over the charger plug and clips onto the edge of the phone's keyboard. It actually works

Had to happen at some point:


Yes I wanted to do it anyway, but it was a good choice for learning more about the whole process; it happens to have a lot of awkward features that I've had to figure out how to print. Including hacking raw Gcode because my printer apparently doesn't understand "pause" I've also fought through some of the Onshape annoyances and gained a better understanding of how that works.

Clearly it's not perfect yet, I'm still figuring out how to handle the filament change and the centre antenna suffered badly as a result. But messing with temperatures, retraction settings, etc., has eliminated the stringing between antenna poles.

What surprised me is that the mesh came out perfectly. I ran some tests to see what was the minimum thickness the slicer wouldn't ignore, but I really expected it to droop and look butt-ugly. It's absolutely flawless.

Printed in three pieces - legs and square frame, counterpoise clips into that, antennas and cable tray locate into lugs on the counterpoise. That way I don't waste an entire VOR worth of grey when I balls up changing to the white. It also eliminates supports altogether: The legs print upside-down and the counterpoise sits directly on the print bed. Still need a little radio shack to go underneath.

This is 15cm/6" across, so pretty much 1:200 scale. 1:400 could be interesting.

Nice. Looking forward to seeing more of your works.