Sunday, October 11, 2026
RepRapMicron Single Narrow Beam
I tried to create a single beam with a flexure joint in it as narrow as I could. We're looking at a flexure 20μm thick and a beam width of 60μm. The beam in the image is about 500μm long, but note that one end is severely dinged up. This happened during the washing process. These things are very delicate and very poorly attached to the slide. That goes double for long, thin bits. Hopefully I can string them together for improved stability. Also this one was only 20μm thick, and thicker is probably more durable - as long as you can get it to stay stuck to the slide!
This object is not attached to the glass, by the way. It came free during the very gentle washing/drying process. I can't see much until the prints are dry because they're too optically close to the surrounding resin/solvent and are basically invisible. I look for the distortions in the fluid surface, which the microscope overhead light brings out quite well. I know there's something there, but have no idea what it is until the solvent dries!
I had to bring print overlap up to 25% and "extrusion" width down to 7μm to make this work. First layer is now 7μm and subsequent are 4μm. I'm printing at 120μm/s with 100μm/s bridging. Next step I suppose is to have two beams carrying a flexure between them...
