Hot Rod Stage of 3D Printing

While at toorcamp, we made a machine. Matt, who runs the Metrix space, which will soon be a coffee shop/design workshop, took the machine off our hands and it’s making things like the D20 seen above!

It worked great in the desert, but for some reason, it needed to be tweaked a bit when it returned to civilization, the extrusion was coming out to fast and was squishing down each layer. We changed the speed from 26.5 to 29 to make it stretch out more and the layer hight from 3.75 to 3.5 and it seemed much happier.

This is pretty standard for occasional MakerBot maintenance and I liken it to the days when you got a car and you had to know how it worked because there wasn’t someone to change the oil, you had to do it! Because you put it together, you know how it works and you can tweak it! I’ve found that once a machine is printing happily, it needs very little maintenance to print happily for months.

You don’t have do tweak your MakerBot in a vacuum. The community is there to help. There’s a google group for those that have bought MakerBots and the Forums are lively and full of good advice. If those don’t work, you can always send us a note and we’ll do our best to point you in the right direction.

In the spirit of hot rods, here’s a video that the gang over at Metalab put together of a car!

Tagged with 2 comments
 

2 Comments so far

  • Wade
    July 13, 2009 at 12:54 pm
     

    Hey, what are the units on those numbers? Was it a change in the volumetric rate of plastic flow, or just a change in the force required to extrude the same amount of plastic? Interesting!

     
  • Conrad2468
    July 13, 2009 at 8:29 pm
     

    I might suggest that you use HDPE because it has less friction than ABS and SHOULD roll better….but i still havent got my makerbot working YET!

     
 

Leave your comment

 
 
 

xhtml: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>