When I was a wee lass, perhaps 5 or 6 years old, my family took us for a camping trip in the English country side. The English weather lived up to its good name. It rained the entire time and the field was muddy. Before long, my wonderful father suggested the brilliant idea of taking me to a nearby pub. I realize now that it was probably at the request of my Mother, to get me out of her hair so that she could get the tent set up.
Finally getting around to posting these lamps. We are going through some pretty major renos this year including our kitchen with a bar area. (Yes, of course it’s going to have plumbed in beer taps, did you really need to ask?) We’ll also be installing hanging pendant lights over the bar top and I’d been thinking about 3D printing our own. This year we were involved in an art show as well as the Synchronicity Festival and I made the lamps my project.
TL;DR: It works, try it.
I finished off the furnace with another couple of pounds of refractory cement, and let it dry for a couple of days, then fired it slowly over a few hours to burn out the rest of the water. Things looked solid, so the next step was to try and cast something. Of course, my first thought was to “forge” some currency, and the results are below:
Just switched to a more “standard” heated bed, and a JHead to replace my long suffering makergear extruder.
I cannot believe it has been nearly two years since I built this printer!
I have added some updates to Reticulatus which vastly improve the OpenGL display window. Now I am ready to start adding slicing tools to the UI.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cn2QE-PHxA&w=853&h=480]
Python based 3d printer slicers need to be faster: rantenki/reticulatus.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE1XwmJm848&w=853&h=480]
It should be noted that this has no interface, no gui, not cmdline, andcannot yet be used for slicing unless you call the libraries directly from python. That is all.
This years Maker Faire prep has been a lot less stressful than last years. It’s at the PNE this year and I’m SO looking forward to a bag of hot mini doughnuts. We’ll be heading into Vancouver tomorrow with all our stuff including Derek’s 3D printer:
http://youtu.be/JbwcxqFSF-4
I have been having some issues with insufficient bed adhesion, especially when using some less than stellar PLA, so started experimenting with a variety of bed treatments. ABS paint, bluetape and Kapton all worked pretty well, but the new, all time champion is now PVA/Weldbond glue in an ultra-thin layer, only a few molecules thick, which gets the strongest (perhaps too strong) bond I have ever managed. This thin layer completely eliminates any corner lift, and prevents the tape from being pulled off of the bed as well.
I should probably be posting a bit more often, so here is a video of a recent test print of Mr. Alligator. The trick here is the crazy speed, and also the vibration of the pulleys. More coming soon! [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuQZ-TEaSpg]
