Monday 27 September 2010

Printing Upgrades - Progress update

I have not had much time to print or experiment with my Repstrap in the last week, but it has been hard at work printing my first Geared Extruder parts so it can start to upgrade itself.

Tweaking and tuning for better Quality has been very worthwhile, it teaches you lots about Fused-filament limits and also about you'r specific system, you can't learn everything from a Wiki, Forum or Blogs, the best method is try it yourself.
For now I have settled on the following settings so I can start to print out some practical upgrade parts.
This is not the best quality, but I'm getting minimal warp and speed is not bad - 
A print speed of 1000mm / min
0.4 layer height
0.5 Nozzle size (but I'm going to make and test a 0.7 shortly)
One outer shell (2 shells when printing gears)
1.5mm Infill pattern (45 and -45)
Outline at 90% speed.
Basic Pinch-wheel Extruder (That I'm very impressed with actually)

Still not using accelerations in my firmware, but as soon as I have a working Geared extruder, then I'm going to re-tune the whole system again and switch Accelerations back on to try getting the speed up.

Print 1 on the far left was the very first thing my machine printed.

Print 2 was 1.8mm infill and slow, ok quality, but not correct Extruder settings.

Print 3 was much too fast. Good extruder settings, but the motor was skipping steps (you can see loops of infill at the front).

Print 4 has just completed, 1000mm/min 1 outline and 1.5mm Infill, nice and smooth, and feels strong.

I printed a few other things, to test some of the earlier settings - 
Whistle - (Version 2) - http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1046

Probe Holder - (only 50% printed, I decided I didn't need one that badly) - http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3525

It's printing the Geared Extruder Block and both the WADE gears Now, so I will hopefully be able to Blog them tomorrow.

RichRap.


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