MakerBot Industries

Too cool! Too cool!

Even when you’ve got Skeinforge totally dialed in there can be other potential problems with getting a perfect print. ¹  A drafty room, cold ambient temperature, or too much moisture can all cause problems.  Just as cold and wet conditions can lead to suboptimal prints, so can too much heat.  If a layer is still molten and gooey when the next layer is laid down on top of it, the lower layer can get squished or pulled out of place.  Through the use of judicious cooling, you can ensure you don’t have a problem with a molten lower layer.

Besides the Thing-O-Matic’s built-in fan, there have been a number of extruder cooling mechanisms:

• The Ducted Cooling Fan by Iwo
• Around-the-Nozzle Cooling Ring by scanlime
• HYPERVENTILATOR! by ScribbleJ

ScribbleJ’s version, while perhaps the most labor intensive, is easily the most well documented and entertaining to read.  If you haven’t already checked it out, some of those pictures are priceless.

For more information and ideas on fighting the gooey layer problem, check out Bothacker’s work with Skeinforge’s Cool function and Tesla893′s idea of printing multiple copies of parts at once.

1. Photo courtesy of Piero…assente fino a domani [↩]