It has been a while so I thought I had better get my backside into gear and provide some info on recent activities. I have been fairly distracted lately with other life events including the recent illness and passing away of my Mother-in-law so that has taken a lot of time away from this project. We are getting back into it however and I have also been taking some time away just to do something else for a while in my spare time, mainly because it is so cold up here and I can't spend too much time in the workshop because of it. I guess lots of people have heard of the so-called 'polar-vortex' recently and it certainly applies to my unheated workshop!
In any case, to get back to MakerPlane stuff! I purchased a 3D printer early last year and after almost a year waiting, finally got it just before Christmas. It is a Makibox 3D printer that I purchased for $399. http://www.makibox.com. (Now before you rush out and buy one, read this topic first.) With all of the personal stuff as well as a broken part on the printer, I haven't really been able to get it up and running until a couple of weeks ago. I have had failures, success and failure with this thing, but have learnt a massive amount about 3D printing in the process. It is certainly a hands-on thing and not a plug and play piece of equipment. I think I have dismantled and re-assembled this thing at least 2 dozen times!
My first print after constructing the kit was a disaster. It was supposed to be a 20mm x 20mm calibration cube:
I found out that the lead screws weren't seated into the motor coupling properly from the factory, so they were free rotating and causing the axis to slip. I thought I had fixed the problem with epoxy and printed out a second cube.
Unfortunately the coupling still slipped so I took it apart and epoxied again.
I did another print when the epoxy dried of a squirrel. I was getting bored of the cube! This time, my fix appeared to have worked:
Of course, after I got that print out, the next problem appeared which was the extruder motor was chewing up the plastic filament and screwing up prints:
I found that the bolts holding the motor were in too tight and therefore constricting the feed mechanism. After I got that sorted out, it was looking good for more complex prints and I managed to get out a Minecraft Creeper and some Yoda's:
Getting my confidence up now, I thought it was time to do something useful, so I made an allen key handle (a bit more relevant to MakerPlane as well!)
Unfortunately I am still finding that one of the axis has slop and is wobbling during the prints, particularly the smaller calibration cubes. I printed out a Tardis this morning to check alignment and my fears are realized that I still have issues there to sort out as you can see in the pix below. The tardis is slanting and twisting as it is being built:
I any case, I will continue to post on progress. It is my opinion that although a cheap printer, it isn't what we need for MakerPlane. It is too small a build platform as well for larger items like control handles (108mm d x 149mm d x 88mm h , so looking for an alternative. More to follow.....
John