RepRap: Blog

I went down to my hardware stockists and acquired a piece of 5.56 mm acrylic sheet to replace the 3 mm sheet that came with my Rapman. That done, I printed my guyed, 5x20x150 beam again using ABS and printing at 16.8 mm/sec. I processed the STL using Skeinforge and used a 40% hexagonal fill.

I removed the beam immediately after printing it...



... and stripped off the raft.



I am not able to detect any bowing in the resulting beam. The raft on which the beam was printed was rather coarse as you can see in the pictures in the previous guying blog item. It may be that there is some very small amount of bowing that is lost in the roughness of the bottom of the print caused by the raft. If there is, I suspect that it is much less than 1 mm over the 150 mm length of the beam.

The STL for the beam with the guyed flanges looks like this...



I would appreciate it greatly if others would try to print this beam in ABS on other Reprap printers so that I can confirm my results. If you are interested in trying this you can get the STL from here.

Thanks.

One thing in passing. If you are going to print ABS onto an acrylic print base, something I can recommend highly, I'd strongly suggest you get one of these.



It is a scraper used by professional house painters to clean enamel off of windows. It separates ABS rafts from your print base very quickly and cleanly with a minimum of drama.