Creating 3D models is hard
3D printing is easy. You can buy a 3D printer off the shelf for a few hundred of your Earth pounds, download patterns from thingiverse and be printing solid stuff straight away. Creating your own 3D models is harder, and it seems to me that this is now the bottleneck (at least, if you don’t want to spend a lot of money). There are several options. You can scan a real item, if you have a 3D …
It's not my fault!
It’s probably not my fault, at least. If you’ve been following my blog (and why wouldn’t you?), you’ll know that I have had some issues with my 3D printer printing things skewed. It got particularly annoying a day or two ago when a five-hour print ended up unusable. It’s about time I got this problem sorted out. Annoyingly, it seems that every time I do a test print, …
Things are hotting up
I haven’t posted much about the 3D printer recently (or indeed about anything else). This is partly because I have been trying to work out what was the cause of poor print quality. I’ve finally worked out what the cause of the problem was. I’d been finding it increasingly difficult to print larger objects, particularly those which involved long continuous print movements. The …
Richmond revealed
I was at one of Rob’s excellent rather useful seminars yesterday. As it was about 3D printing, Rob asked me to say a little bit about my printer. Having not prepared to do anything, I relied on some bits of video I found on my tablet. Thinking about it, I realised that although this blog has quite a few posts about specific parts of the building process, there isn’t really a post just simply …
Turn again, Whittington!
As a devoted reader of my blog, you will know that I’m engaged in a continuing quest to improve the precision of my 3D printer. The most recent improvement was to replace all the pivots in my original design, which were simply composed of screws passing through holes in plastic, with proper miniature ball bearings. This has had a huge benefit – there is now very little play in the movement of the …
Pink plastic printer parts printed
Last weekend, the ever-generous Rob very kindly printed out a whole batch of parts for my 3D printer:
With the ones he’s already done for me (and a few bearings, nuts and bolts and bit of carbon fibre rod) these comprise enough to build the printer completely, apart from the ‘hot end’. So that’s what I’ve done over the last few days. Although the parts were printed to quite high accuracy, with …
Printer Claus has come to town!
As you know (because you follow my blog very closely), I’m building my own 3D printer. Today I received a box of stepper motors, an Arduino Mega 2560 board and a RAMPS controller board kit. These are the major items that I had to buy (rather than getting Rob to print for me). Having spent actual money, I’m now really committed to building the printer. Any day now I should receive the aluminium …