This week’s edition is available on my YouTube channel.
Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am printing up the remaining corner brackets for my 3D printer case. Let’s get started.
This week, I decided to explore the different quality settings for my printer’s slicer program, Cura. As I start writing this week’s post, I’m printing out the third of eight corner brackets, each one so far sliced at different quality level. The only obvious difference is the time required to print. As I posted last week, I suspect the raft comes off more easily the higher the print quality, but I’m waiting on drawing final conclusions for now, since the easy raft removals were from .gcode patterns that shipped with the printer and I have no way of knowing what level of quality they were sliced with.
I’m also noticing this webbing stuff across crevices in all three bracket qualities. Judging by the print in progress, I’m guessing the infill is spaced progressively tighter on the higher quality prints, but the official call will wait until I have my final sample. Of note: the printer sounds fairly consistent no matter the printing quality.
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Progress bars are wonderful estimation tools. The Printer has one. But I don’t think it measures progress in terms of either time or plastic used so far. There are times when it feels like the job is lagging behind schedule as it chugs through big layers only for the progress bar to catch up as it blitzes through smaller, faster layers. I believe the printer is simply measuring percent completion in terms of Z axis progress. Another easily programmable possibility would be to report percentage of the .gcode file executed. But exploring that question should be a topic for another week where I also cover learning the basics of Blender.
With that said, the third bracket just came off the printer. Toward the end, the printer screen dropped the print job monitor in favor of the main menu. What’s going on with that? End of .gcode file? I’ll need to keep that quirk under observation in the future.
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The webbing seems to be about the same density and strand size no matter what quality I print on. The brackets each weigh in at .7 oz; if they differ at all, I don’t have a precise enough scale to tell. The rafts from high and normal quality jobs came off cleanly within seconds by hand, but the low quality raft split on removal, requiring additional cleanup later. The webs will also require some tools to extract, but the toughest thing about them is the tricky angle for fingers. The infill on the high and normal settings is the same, but the fast print is only 2/5 as frequent. Interestingly, the sides of the normal bracket and not the low quality one, are the roughest. Ironically the top tips of the corners of the “high” quality print didn’t stick correctly and broke off. In conclusion: I’m going to use the normal setting for the remaining brackets.
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I messed around in Cura some more and I started printing the next two brackets at once. I wonder what the overall quality difference will be. The extruder tip is alternating brackets, laying a layer down on one then the other. It takes a little longer, but combining jobs saves time on resetting the printer. I can only guess that there will be a bunch of webbing connecting these print bed twins.
All the rafts for these brackets so far are triangular, but on all the normal prints, and only on the normal prints, one or two corners of the raft get omitted, including each of the twins. Messing with Cura again, I found the size controls to make objects bigger or smaller. Those get left alone for now.
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The twin brackets are almost done. They do indeed have a bit of webbing between them, but it isn’t so bad. I’m not sure, but there might be less self webbing per bracket than any of the singles. I’ll need to run many more print cycles to know for sure.
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Filming for this week’s presentation was riddled with challenges. I tried filming the twins, but I quickly ran out of storage on the camera. Bracket number six was printed on low quality so the camera could swallow filming it from start to finish. Unfortunately, the sun went down and the lights inside were off, so that take was botched due to low light at the end. The raft didn’t peel nicely either, instead it royally fractured along where bracket met raft. I ended up bumping the quality on the camera down a level to capture the single, normal-quality bracket number seven being printed. After this one is done, I’ll have one more to print up before next week’s topic where I finish the printer case.
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Final Question: Do you know a lot about 3D printing? What’s going on with all these plastic fibers?