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Sheet Metal Brake and 3d Printer.

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S. Heslop:
I've been a bit busy lately, but a month later I got a bit more done with this. I was able to remove the two interfering latches and it latches fine now with just the one, since the weather strip has compressed down a bit and is staying compressed. Door still isn't flat so i'll add the handle... eventually.

Went with a Duet Wifi and it seems fairly decent. Still needs some more setting up and tuning.

Produced an enclosure that's someone else's design. I was stumped for a bit since it was massively under-extruding when exported from cura, but it turns out it's a known bug with the older version when exporting gcode.

Took about 40 hours I think. I paused the thing in the middle when going out for a bit so it reset the timer. I think it added a huge amount of time since it was slowly filling in the tiny gap between the inner and outer walls on the... walls. But once I figured that out I wasn't about to restart it. There were also a few unusual errors with it underextruding on only a couple places, and cylindrical features turned out a bit porous. But It should be good enough for this enclosure.



A new infill pattern comes with the Latest Cura. It's kinda neat looking and supposedly more durable and efficient


Anyways my review of the duet wifi so far: It's got a few features I really like. When first starting you can adjust the Z offset as it's running to get it just right. And you can adjust the extrusion multipliers and temperatures on the fly too, as well as other things like fan speeds. It also turns out that it runs from the SD card and you're just uploading the gcode files over wifi (via a web browser interface). It kinda hides alot of features behind gcodes you can send through a console though, which is something i'm learning as I need to. But I still think they could've just made it a bunch of UI elements instead.

I also really appreciate that they have an actual setup wizard, even if their documentation is a bit vague and patchy.

I kinda assumed it'd need to be tethered to a PC as it ran, so finding out it doesn't means the whole space for the laptop is a little redundant. Maybe some day i'll buy their stupid overpriced display to fill the space.

jiihoo:
Your printer seems to print quite nicely!

It is a good idea to try a few of the infill options on Cura or whatever slicer you use before committing to the print. The new infill, gyroid, sounds nice and good and symmetrical strength in all directions and whatnot, but it is not fast to print. I was pondering a 12-hour print the other evening, well it would have been a 12-hour print with gyroid and 10.5 hours with the traditional grid infill. I chose grid because there was nothing to be gained by using gyroid in that particular part. I think I am saving using gyroid for parts where I think it will do some good and stick with grid as the default choice.

If printing something with flex or semiflex filaments, then I believe gyroid infill would be a good choice (probably the best choice there).

Speaking of flex, have you tried any flexible or semi-flexible filaments yet? They open up new possibilities for 3D printing. If you want to do an easy foray into somewhat flexible filaments, try Polyflex from Polymaker. It is semiflex. The reason to try that over any others is that it behaves quite like PLA when printing and should be within the capabilities of most any 3D printer. Start from normal PLA settings and just increase the head temperature a little (to 225-230C); you may not even need to slow down if you are not using warp9 speeds with PLA (40 mm/s would be a fairly safe speed with Polyflex; go down to 30 mm/s if you experience extruding issues but people have reported even 50 mm/s working with it; if you have other problems disable or reduce retraction while working out the issues). Polyflex is generally considered the easiest of the semi-flex filaments to print and works good in both direct extruder and Boyden extruder designs providing the feed path offers reasonable support for the filament (no big gaps where the filament could escape to the side...).

The more flexible filaments can be "somewhat" difficult to print. No personal experience there, but Polyflex definitely works as it should as long as you do your part and keep the spool of filament dry!

PETG might be an interesting option too. It is less hard and less brittle than PLA and reasonably easy to print (i.e. you will only pull out half of your hair before you get it printing good). It is also printable indoors, i.e. no nasty smells ala ABS. I had trouble getting good adhesion of the first layer to the bed, but increasing the bed temperature to 83 for first and 80 for rest of the layers and starting to use a 3D printing adhesive (Magigoo in my  case) solved it. I know many people have managed with lower bed temperatures but for me they didn't work. Also no or very little fan speed is good.

Cheers,

Jari

S. Heslop:
I didn't know there were flexible/ semi-flexible materials that printed through a bowden. I've got a bowden cable on this machine, and a somewhat long one since it's so tall.

PETG is something I want to try, but i'll have to figure out a heated build plate first. And that's probably a ways away. I'm actually kind of surprised by PLA, all the stuff i'd read made it sound like it'd be extremely brittle. Maybe it's the variety I bought, which isn't anything special as far as I know. Velleman from a nearby electronic component place. I'm going to run some tests at some point when I have time. By tests I mean dropping large objects down the stairs.

I think with my intended application though ABS would be the ideal choice. It's part of why I went with a hopefully mostly sealed enclosure. But again I need that heated platform before I can give that a shot and see how well sealed it really is.

awemawson:
I managed to print with Pet-G on my Cetus-3D before my heated bed arrived and it went OK. I was only printing small things though.

WeldingRod:
I've printed with PETG on welding rod bot #1.  Very nice prints, flexible and sturdy.
Nothing reasonable glues it, though.

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