{"id":645,"date":"2014-01-19T11:35:10","date_gmt":"2014-01-19T16:35:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/?p=645"},"modified":"2014-01-19T11:35:10","modified_gmt":"2014-01-19T16:35:10","slug":"initial-forays-into-3d-printing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/archives\/645\/initial-forays-into-3d-printing\/","title":{"rendered":"Initial Forays into 3D Printing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last week, I received my <a href=\"http:\/\/printrbot.com\/shop\/plus-v2-1-kit\/\">Printrbot Plus v2.1 Kit<\/a>. I sat down, and started putting it together.<\/p>\n<p>The Assembly page on the kit website describes the kit as taking 6-10 hours to assemble. In the end, I spent about that getting the thing to the point where it was put together; it wasn&#8217;t all in one sitting, since I found out I was missing a part about 75% of the way through. You can see a time lapse of the initial assembly <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=saCdk-LTsYs&#038;feature=c4-overview&#038;list=UUfoS_RSsblA7N0szMu3btaw\">on YouTube<\/a>. <\/p>\n<p>Some things I learned during assembly &#8212; which almost anyone who&#8217;s built anything probably knows:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Lay out your parts and count them before you start. Organize them, and put them in a spot where they are out of the way of your work area, but easily accessible. You&#8217;ll save a lot of time that way, and a lot of headache when you later find out you&#8217;re missing parts you need.<\/li>\n<li>For something like this &#8212; which required more than 100 screws &#8212; a good electric drill is a good idea. I had one, but didn&#8217;t think to use it until after my initial work; I wasted a lot of time on that.<\/li>\n<li>The Printbot process is targeted at tinkerers. This means that there are some aspects which are&#8230; slightly more fiddly than they should be. (One of my parts didn&#8217;t fit right to start with, and I spent the first 20 minutes of my assembly process trying to fit a part into a hole that it simply couldn&#8217;t fit in.) Don&#8217;t fight it too hard; if something doesn&#8217;t work, move on and come back.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In the end, I had to buy myself a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mcmaster.com\/#catalog\/120\/3182\/=qbixx5\">ACME threaded hex nut<\/a> myself to finish the build; I got an extra 5\/16&#8243; (non-ACME) hex nut instead of the 3\/8&#8243; ACME nut I needed shipped with the bot. (I emailed Printrbot support last Sunday about this &#8212; I&#8217;ve still heard nothing about this.) I used that to finish the assembly. <\/p>\n<p>Initially, I was worried about my filament feeding; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=UG2BDgd13Jc&#038;feature=c4-overview&#038;list=UUfoS_RSsblA7N0szMu3btaw\">you can see a video<\/a> showing how it doesn&#8217;t feed straight down, but <a href=\"http:\/\/www.printrbottalk.com\/forum\/viewtopic.php?f=16&#038;t=6103\">feedback<\/a> on the Printrbot Talk forum suggested this is normal, and I took the next steps of doing a print the following morning. <\/p>\n<p>The first print out came out &#8230; poorly \ud83d\ude42 <\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" width=\"512px\" src=\"https:\/\/scontent-a-lga.xx.fbcdn.net\/hphotos-ash3\/1040155_10103321034906240_1030657316_o.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The reason though was immediately obvious: early on in my print process, I couldn&#8217;t find a set screw on my y axis motor. Each layer that printed, my y-axis was slipping about 2-3mm in the wrong direction, which lead to the disaster that you can see.<\/p>\n<p>On Friday night, I fixed that, and the next print was actually stacking the layers, which is good; but my bed being far from level meant that the print head was running into itself on higher layers, and created a mess.<\/p>\n<p>My third print was the charm: <\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm4.staticflickr.com\/3689\/12013178695_5fa3cab780.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>(Total print time was about 15 minutes.)<\/p>\n<p>It produced a reasonably solid calibration print. (You can see a video of the printing process: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=OtGQHXAtaNg&#038;feature=c4-overview&#038;list=UUfoS_RSsblA7N0szMu3btaw\">part 1<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=8OHDkqwgWLU&#038;feature=c4-overview&#038;list=UUfoS_RSsblA7N0szMu3btaw\">Part 2<\/a>.) <\/p>\n<p>Since then, I&#8217;ve had more issues with extruder feeding, etc. but at least one of my prints actually worked, and it seems like I&#8217;m now in the same part of printing process that most hobbyists get to and stay in. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p>In total, I spent about 10 hours building the thing, another couple hours getting it set up and working. I consider the project a success overall.<\/p>\n<p>Hopefully in the next couple weeks I can finish my assembly, get things tightened up, and get a few more interesting things printed \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last week, I received my Printrbot Plus v2.1 Kit. I sat down, and started putting it together. The Assembly page on the kit website describes the kit as taking 6-10 hours to assemble. In the end, I spent about that getting the thing to the point where it was put together; it wasn&#8217;t all in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[116],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-3d-printing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=645"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}