OK, here's the tidied up version. I had to ream out the vertical holes by hand, the horizontal holes were fine and just needed de-stringing. I have seen how threads of molten plastic climb up the curved surface of an acorn nut nozzle and I'm modifying one to see if I can reduce the stringing. The holes in general were smeared somewhat, mostly due to a soon-to-be-fixed software bug which resulted in the extruder not being turned off at appropriate moments.
In the previous post, you can see the part starting to curl like a king-size mattress being stuffed into a queen-size fitted sheet. The curl is not very pronounced, but did distort the 8mm holes making the insertion of an 8mm rod very tight indeed - you can see shavings on the end closest to the camera. The nuts fitted into the rectangular slots at the top without a problem. The other holes were a little tight and required gentle persuasion to drive the nuts home - a bolt and very large washer was used to winch them in.
What didn't fit was the nut down the channel in the 8mm hole. My reaming didn't clean that out enough and I had to resort to a dremmel tool.
It near enough works and I'll be building it into a Reprap as soon as I can.
I'm extruding in 0.55mm layers, 1.62mm outline size and 0.73mm infill size from a 0.86mm nozzle. Max x-y movement speed is set to 238. This gives fat outlines, but because of the jerky movement between points by the head, curved lines are fatter than straight lines and the slow speed minimises the difference in width.
A very respectable 0.5mm width wall was printed by mistake during a buggy phase of this printout when the nozzle moved without being turned off, but this is good as it shows what the hardware is actually capable of - even with a 0.86mm nozzle.
Vik :v)
That is excellent, is this the first working part going into a RepRap?
ReplyDeleteI think it's the first Darwin-specific part. We've made an extruder before, and Zaphod had a couple of self-fabricated clamps in it.
ReplyDeleteI've added the X idler pulley to the assembly now, BTW.
Vik :v)
"In the previous post, you can see the part starting to curl like a king-size mattress being stuffed into a queen-size fitted sheet."
ReplyDeleteYup, that happens with HDPE, too. The trick is to design parts with critical surfaces on the top side of the print and holes as far away from bottom corners as possible.
I've been thinking about getting a cheap belt sander to simply sand off the curly bottom. :-)