After giving Makerware a public lashing I found myself in contact with Joe Sadusk who is a developer for MakerWare at Makerbot (this blog attracts the Joes doesn’t it?) We spent the weekend talking about MakerWare, the shortcomings it had and Sadusk defended MakerWare extremely well. So I decided to give MakerWare another shot and since I needed to test …
Makerbot vs uPrint
My day job has got a uPrint 3D printer by Stratysis which is also a FFF machine like my Replicator, so I decided to print amodel out on both of our machines to see which one looks better. The final judgement is surprisingly neck-and-neck: The uPrint has comparable resolution to the Makerbot, in fact the Makerbot is slightly higher even, but the uPrint has more …
Acetone Vapor for Smoothing ABS
Jumping to the end the final result: This is a great way to quickly give a glossy finish to your prints and it does hide the layers somewhat, but getting good results necessitates having good starting material. There’s a lot of talk about using an acetone vapor to smooth ABS prints so I thought I’d try it out. But instead …
Now I know where the value is
Restocking Glow-in-the-Dark 3D Hypnorings had a the black filament stop midway through the print. Actually, it’s kinda of cool looking. But when I tried to figure out why the black stopped none of the usual suspects presented themselves. No knot in the spool, things were going good on that side. But if I did the load procedure no filament came …
More PLA experiments
So far I’ve confirmed: PLA likes painter’s blue tape. I’m using Duct brand. PLA can print cooler than ABS. I’ve been printing at 185 C. Printing without a cooling fan causes increased stringiness. What I printed to fix it didn’t work, so for now I’m back to a fan on a box. You need to cool down or turn off …
Print’n PLA
Thanks to Joseph Chiu I find myself in possession of a few 100 grams of PLA so, with my heated print bed out of commission until makerbot ships me the new part later this week I figure now is the time to try it out. The difference with printing PLA is you want to print on blue painters tape,drop the …
Shells Vs Time
TheNewHobbiest asked me on twitter: @CymonsGames I was reading your blog post on printing with additional shells. Do more shells shorten or lengthen print times? That’s an excellent question. Let’s find out. Fortunately I can find out without actually doing prints. The estimate function in ReplicatorG will give me something to compare. The first subject I tested was Cinderella’s Castle …
Zeni Kinetic, Competitive, Local Made Filament
Just a quick heads up. There’s a company from here in Utah that is entering the Filament game. Not the filament distribution game, the filament manufacturing game. Zeni Kinetic has their own production facilities right here using a top secret process to produce filament at prices competitive to buying your filament overseas. They’re just starting out but I’ve decided to …
What’s your resolution?
A lot of talk is made about resolution in 3D printing. What that means is the thickness of the layers. Individual layers are drawn in a continuous line so each layers doesn’t really get any more detail than the next one. However, being able to stack more layers makes it harder to see the individual layers resulting in a better print at …
Filament by the foot
Friend of the blog and fellow 3D printer Joseph Chiu has decided to plunge into filament sales. If you’ve ever wanted a color but didn’t want to commit to a full kilogram he’s selling 100g bundles of ABS or PLA in many colors so you can test it out before you commit to the big buy. 100kg is plenty to …