Sheet Metal Brake and 3d Printer.

[BillTodd]

Excellent thread.

Does anyone know of great uses for 3d printed stuff ?
Commercial ?

Well the break through is starting to happen in the aircraft world. Titanium is expensive and a sod to machine* , so 3d printing titanium parts prior to machining (like castings) instead of machining from stock,  saves a huge amount of time and money . There are now many machinery maker adding  laser sintering  into their cnc workstations

Printing is also having an impact on the design of parts. The use of "organic" designs that would be difficult or impossible to machine allow parts to me made lighter without loss of strength ( imagine a simple right angle bracket , replaced by a 3d structure that has finger-like supports only where needed).

Bill


* The motorsport division of the firm I work for make parts for the Redbull F1  cars , one design of brake disc carrier (imagine a thing the shape and size of a soup bowl but with more holes than metal) was taking 80 hours to machine and 90%+ of the material was thrown away.

[AdeV]

Bill,

I went to the Racing Car show at the Birmingham NEC (that's Birmingham UK... not AL) a few years back, and got talking to a company that made laser sintering 3D printers. At the time, they could be ordered for titanium or aluminium (I'm not sure if the same machine would do both?). The machines were quite reasonably priced, I thought - around £10,000 or (at the time) about $16,000. The titanium powder to fill it, however... well, it was considerably more than the machine!

I'd love to get hold of one myself; I think it could pay its way back in the motorsport industry in very little time...

[S. Heslop]

Only £10,000? Does that include the laser?

[AdeV]

Only £10,000? Does that include the laser?

I've been thinking about it... I  may be out by a factor of 10.... it was a few years ago!

[S. Heslop]

Been up to this the last few days. It's relatively simple but it being so large made it a chore. It's not entirely square but it's close enough. Just need the plexiglass to finish it but i'll probably put the machine in first just to make sure there's clearance for all the moving parts. Little worried the hinges and catches might get in the way - it's a little on the small side just so I could get it all out of one sheet of plywood. 12mm plywood was also a poor choice as it's a little on the flexible side too. I'll probably need a handle so I can lift the door up into the top catch. Toggles would've been the better choice, and I might have to go that way if things interfere. Some bracing might also help, especially on the door, but i'll need to see where I could fit it.

So for the controller board. I was all set to buy the Duet Wifi at £120, but it turns out they don't include VAT on their website. Or shipping. So it went up to £150, and now i'm back to thinking if it's worth giving the MKS Sbase another shot. I've had a look at the setup procedure for the Duet and it's as complicated and stupid as any other board. What's wrong with 3d printing people... Either way i've ran out of time to mess about with this stuff so i'll possibly take a break once it's in the enclosure.

[S. Heslop]

Whoa nelly. Turns out that hump in the middle made it impossible to fit without partially disassembling the machine.



I remember I realised that when I was first drawing the box up - I made it extra tall so I could get it in. But when trying to fit the panels into a single plywood sheet I forgot all about that.


This is where the laptop will go. It turns out laptops count as a 'horizontal surface', and like any horizontal surface it collects clutter. This is more of a storage solution than anything else!


Also as feared the catches interfere with the drag chain. Still thinking what to do. The obvious thing would be to move them to the top and bottom but they're here to help keep the front flat for the sake of sealing the box. The hinges just clear on the right hand side so I can't move the whole thing further right, and I can't move the chain any further back. Plus the chain is flush against the side. No room to brace the door flat there internally... So I guess I might have to go with an external toggle or maybe a threaded insert in the side and a screw to pull the door in.

Oh yeah also gotta make some taller feet so there's clearance for airflow.

[AdeV]

Just thinking out loud here: Could you adapt the bracket that's mounting the catch so the screws go backwards instead of sideways; then rout a notch out of the side wall and screw the bracket into the back of the notch, such that the rollers are in the same position, but now moved out of the way? Admittedly, it's not going to win any beauty contests, but it would be the quickest solution.

Another option would be some kind of lever latch, again with the pin embedded in the side wall & a slot for the tongue to engage. Either make some kind of spring-loaded push-pull tongue (triangular shaped, so it could force its way past the pin), or just a hook shape, and have a handle on the front to open it. Quite a bit of fiddly mechanical workings out to do for that one though... but it would look tidy.

[S. Heslop]

I just realised I could totally brace it on the front with a big beefy and tall handle. Then I can just stick with latches on the top and bottom, out of the way of the chain.

[AdeV]

Excellent idea - it'll look cool too!

[WeldingRod]

Nice enclosure!
I used a pair of.magnets to latch mine.  You could rout them in to the two surfaces.

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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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