Cetus3D 3D Printer

[PekkaNF]

Next thing you know you will be printting winnie the pooh, tigger and then Wallace and Grommit buttons.

Pekka

[DMIOM]

.....Wife is knitting a cardigan for very young offspring of a farmer friend - Ba Ba Blacksheep theme complete with picture but bemoaned the fact she couldn't find any suitable buttons - well print some.....

Andrew - just a thought - not sure how young the recipient is, but are they safe if chewed?

Dave

[awemawson]

Yes we thought about that 

This poor kid (not yet born) is going to start life in the rough in a caravan in a field while his parents try to get their barn built around them to house their herd of cattle. Family farm sold under them when parents died - house and barns gone to Yuppies and my friend left with 20 acres and the livestock with nowhere to house them or themselves. Life can be hard 

[efrench]

If you print the buttons in ABS, you can use acetone vapor to polish them.

ABS sticks well to 3M painters tape, so a heated bed isn't necessary.

[PekkaNF]

That is a rough start for that family. I can only imagine how worried the parents are.

I was told that my mum put us all kids in the purpose build kids pen while she was working in the barn, farther was working in the woods and farm is allaways much work. The barn was evenntually coming appart and we have to move out for a winter....I hear it was a hard winter but that is not how I remember it. It was a new exciting place and I had not started the school yet. All the stuf explore. Spring came, and us kidds were helping as we could in the new barn building site.

I heard it was rough times, but to me it was an adventure. We had to make all the little we had to do. I remeber chippinng plaster out of used tiles and straighening nails to reuse them.


Pekka

[awemawson]

How did I ever manage without a 3D printer ?

Today our front gate, which is electrically operated, opened spontaneously. Now it's being doing this when it rains hard, and I'd tracked it down to the pedestrian entry keypad, which gives a closed relay contact to the controller to open the gate. As a temporary expedient I had removed the 12 v supply to the keypad so that it couldn't operate it's internal relay - BUT TODAY THE GATE OPENED 

Investigation showed that water had entered, and there was a heavy rust streak on the plastic between the Common and Normally Open terminals that presumable was borderline able to conduct enough to open the gate.

I pulled it apart, cleaned it up and bench proved it all as working, but as well as giving it more shielding from weather, I wanted to spray the internal PCB with a waterproof 'con-formal coating' that is excellent at improving insulation in damp conditions. However it is also an effective glue, so it needs to be kept out of things that need to move, like the switches on the PCB that the external buttons operate. Now things like the edge connector, and a plug in I/C could be masked with masking tape, but those tiny little switches defied my banana like fingers, when it came to trying to mask them.

SO PRINT SOME COVERS - after all YOU HAVE A 3D Printer

Quickly knocked up a Fusion 360 model, printed them and the conformal coating is drying as I type this 

[spuddevans]

Nice one Andrew 

Only problem is, once word gets around, everyone will be asking you for "a little favour". After all, you just have to push a couple of buttons and "Poof!!" the desired item magically appears 

Tim

[PekkaNF]

Pretty nifty!

Just out of curiocity: the nozzles on your "Hydroponic Pig Cooler" are they round orifice ones, or do they have a slit or flexible flapper?

Pekka

[awemawson]

Pretty nifty!

Just out of curiocity: the nozzles on your "Hydroponic Pig Cooler" are they round orifice ones, or do they have a slit or flexible flapper?

Pekka

The end cap that screws on has a very small round hole, but the cap traps another bit of plastic  that has a helical groove in it so that the water is already dizzy before it squirts through the hole. I presume that getting the water spinning aids the mist formation 

[PekkaNF]

Pretty nifty!

Just out of curiocity: the nozzles on your "Hydroponic Pig Cooler" are they round orifice ones, or do they have a slit or flexible flapper?

Pekka

The end cap that screws on has a very small round hole, but the cap traps another bit of plastic  that has a helical groove in it so that the water is already dizzy before it squirts through the hole. I presume that getting the water spinning aids the mist formation 

Not sure if I follow, but that sounds morre like a structure made for metering a certain amout of fluid.

Normal short orifce (hole in the disc) or such has drawbacks if very small hole is made, small diametrs are hard drill/debur, thye clog easy and wear.

Longer restriction normally works better on tose accounts. But instead of long hole ususally a threaded hole is used. Like on oil metering orifices on some machine tools (I think brigeport table has that). In oil metering componenets are cheap: Taps of knwown accuracy are produced and set screws too. If the metering orifice blocks, cleaning it is a matter of openeing and closing it. Adjustment is easy: Choose diferent lengt of set screw,, precise location is not needed just lengh.

It still could have same priciple and retai ease of cleaning if ti is sort of groove on cylinder suface and pluggs to cylinder.

Or I may have got wrong altogether.

Pekka

[awemawson]

Nice one Andrew 

Only problem is, once word gets around, everyone will be asking you for "a little favour". After all, you just have to push a couple of buttons and "Poof!!" the desired item magically appears 

Tim

Tim,

This is already happening !

Local farmer brought me a drain down plug from his milking machine where the thread had stripped. (This is for the water wash down not for the milk itself)

What remains of the plug measures 19 tpi and the body measures OK for a very worn 3/8" BSP thread - 0.600" as opposed to 0.656" by specification.

This was drawn by sweeping a profile around 360 degrees to make the 3D form in order to create the circular groove, but this method prevented me putting the parallel knurls in the grip. Had I made that as a separate body and merged them in Fusion 360 I could have had the best of both worlds.

[efrench]

Here's one way to add the knurling:

Create a sketch on the top face. Draw the profile of the knurls. Draw a circle slightly larger than the knurls.  Extrude|Cut the knurls.  If you don't want them the full length, you can use a 2 direction extrude (one direction will be minus).

You can also use the split tool to separate the knurled part from the rest of the body, then recreate the knurled part.

Note: you don't have to join the bodies in order to export as STL for 3d printing.

[awemawson]

Here you go, one knurled grip just for the hell of it, and now I've got 'holes in circular surfaces' under my belt, the correct number of cross bores (three) as the other examples had four - matters not a jot functionally, but this is a learning exercise for me.

[spuddevans]

Nice one Andrew 

Tim

[nrml]

Did you have to apply a sealant to the printed plug to make it water tight?

[awemawson]

No it seems OK as is. I printed it at maximum density.

[awemawson]

Well at long last my Heated Bed arrived for the Cetus3D printer. First one got lost in the post, but they replaced it.

Fairly straightforward to fit once you deduce that there is only one possible orientation for it, that the coated bed supplied with the printer needs to go on top of it held in with longer screws, and that the ribbon cable supplied is way too long and the surplus has to be tucked away into the electronics box.

Rather than put a load of pictures up, I found this excellent video on YouTube explaining the fact that although it can be interally or externally powered, in fact there are two independent heating elements in the bed:

embedding not working so here is the link


www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZlT1WpGr6o

I've now successfully printed ABS - here is a picture of some ABS gear wheels that I made

[Pete.]

Hey Andrew you've used underline tags instead of youtube tags for your video link.

BTW I have the same thermal camera adapter as him, plugs into my Android phone. I use it to freak out the kids by leaving thermal handprints on the wall

[awemawson]

Well spotted that man - have a beer 

[awemawson]

Well I've just finished a mammoth print run on the Cetus 3D printer, which it coped with like a champ

For some time I've had a pair of 'desk-top' metal tool racks designed to take a variety of 'inserts' to hold differing shanks of tooling. As I got them each was equipped to take seven 4 Morse Taper tools. Although I do have 4MT drills, they already have a rack so I wanted to 're-purpose' these to take the VDI40 tooling for the Beaver TC20 CNC lathe.

So, steaming up Fusion 360 I took the basic shape of the 4MT holders, increased the size of the 'tool bore' to take VDI40, and the size of the upper platform to accommodate some of the larger tools, yet retained the mounting peg locations for actually fitting into the rack.

[awemawson]

Then it was a case of churning them out, night and day. I even set a camera on them so I could monitor them printing remotely !

Because of the increased width I 'only' needed twelve, but in the event I actually printed fourteen as two didn't clean up as well as I wanted.

4 hours and 41 minutes each 

End result however is that two previously useless (to me) racks are now very handy, and for a very modest cost compared to buying the real things.

[AdeV]

How many do you print in one sitting?

Once I get my wardrobe slider things right, I'll go for printing all 7 (the first one that's right, I won't need to re-print of course  ) in one go - it's a 7 hour print right now, because of the height I think, for minimal overhangs, I've got them printing vertically. Not sure how much each extra item will add, but I'm hoping it's rather less than 7 hours...

[awemawson]

Just the one at a time Ade. Two might just about squeeze in but the print time wouldn't be much less.

[AdeV]

Crumbs - how big ARE they? It looks like you should easily be able to get 4 or even 6 on the bed at once... unless my sense of scale is completely out of kilter?

[awemawson]

100 mm x 70 mm by about 65 tall

For scale the hole in the middle is 42 mm (To take a VDI 40 spigot)

The Cetus 3D table build size is 180 mm x 180 mm