Sunday, March 30, 2008
Serendipity
The MDF base of my Darwin is getting a little worn where I keep building experiments on it then ripping them off. I decided to bolt something sacrificial onto it to build upon. I had no more MDF, but I did have some balsa wood so I tried that.
It works really well. Above is the X-axis PCB holder. Even with PCL this has a slight tendency to curl up at the ends because it's so long and thin. But with balsa wood, no such problem - it builds perfectly. It works especially well if you run the first layer a little low. This causes the extruder to force the polymer into the grain a bit, giving good adhesion. But the balsa is so weak that it's still easy to separate the built part (though some bits of balsa come away with the part, they are simple to clean off with your fingernail).
Here are two of the general PCB brackets built in one build:
I made a little aluminium template to cut the balsa round with a scalpel and to act as a jig for the holes through which I bolt it to the base. And, as it gets a bit tatty, you can double its life by turning it over, of course.
Labels: balsa, build platform
