Thursday 19 December 2013

Illuminati



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My Mendel90 lives in a heated chamber in the garage. It's dark in there, and I got fed up of checking on print progress with a torch.

Luckily I work for a company that has this sort of thing lying around:



It's a PCB strip with 5 RGB LEDs wired to produce white when supplied with 12V d.c. This was a Mk1 which was to be binned, so I saved it an fitted it into my M90 heated chamber.

Now I can see the prints as they progress:

Further Filastruder Prints



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I made some black ABS filament using some masterbatch from CraigRK. It came out really well and I am happy with the prints I have from it. Both on my Mendel90 and gunbot:



One thing I have noticed is that the filament quality from the filastruder is better when the temperature is lower. However, with a low extrusion temp. the die swell is so much with the standard 3mm nozzle that I was getting filament of 3.2mm in diameter. This proved a problem for gunbot.

Due to the metal shards I was getting in the filament (which has cleared now BTW. See the comments in the link) I ordered a nozzle with inbuilt filter.

Quite by accident, they sent me a 1.75mm nozzle instead of the 3mm one I ordered. They said I could easily fix this by drilling out the hole to 2.7mm, as is drilled for the standard 3mm nozzle. I decided to start small, and started with 2.5mm.

Extruding at 185C with this nozzle gave excellent results. 3mm bang on and super smooth filament with the plastic pellets from CraigRK.