3D Printers?

[Gina]

I use white PLA for my astro imaging rigs, including All Sky Camera which stays out in the elements all year round.  No problems with degrading as yet.  It seems to last better in sunlight than commercial ABS or PET items which seem to disintegrate very quickly.  Even in the UK!!!

Edited January 6, 2021 by Gina

[AlexK]

23 hours ago, Chriske said:

What about this test I did years ago now. Different materials. nGen, ABS, PLA.

That's a convincing experiment indeed. Perhaps, you've got some special PLA by an accident? I recall some PLA Plus circulating around. Also that's only one year of exposure so far.

I'm printing since early 2014. One of my first prints was a white PLA conical capsule (just a 3mm-thick-walled, no infill, conical tubing with two springy-fit caps on each end) for the fire-starter kit storage, snug-fitting the hollow handle of my Cold Steel Bushmen knife, which is just sitting in its sheath in the GHB (Get Home Bag) most of the time (so almost zero exposure to anything drastic). A couple of years ago (so that's ~4 years passed) I needed to use that kit, removed the capsule (strong push from the narrow end) and immediately noticed that capsule's ends around both caps have many tiny cracks, they fell apart into several dozens of small rectangular pieces as soon as I've tried to remove caps.

I.o.w. just the stress from tight fit caps destroyed PLA layers in perpendicular direction. Nothing like that with early 6 years-old ABS constructions under a similar stress, nor with 4 years old PETG things... And that's just one example out of almost a dozen, the most sad one being the wide/macro lens keychain holder for my smartphone crumbling on the latch pivot bad enough to lose the lens somewhere in Australia bushes.

So, I would advise inspecting your marvelous white binos in 3 years to be safe 

EDIT: Another hypothesis (reading Gina above) would be to see if the hygroscopic properties of PLA may play a role in humid GB climate  But I'm in front of the Golden Gate (San Francisco) as well, and the thick fog is passing through the eucalyptus forest at the base of my dwellings highscrapper almost every morning (the GHB is watertight though)...

Edited January 7, 2021 by AlexK

[Chriske]

There are lots of printed objects in our garden. The first object I started to 'expose' to the sun was as early as 2013. No deterioration so far. The very first objects I printed using PLA, in different colours btw, exposed to the elements I stored them in a black open container. The idea was to see what would happen with these objects in that kind of environment.  The coloured objects de-coloured after a few years, but still are very strong. These objects are wheels for model trains (Gauge1).
I buy my PLA here, maybe you could buy from them and test for yourself...
What's more, I do buy their  'Economy PLA', so nothing fancy.
Test it and we'll talk again in a few years...😉

Before and after lots of sun. Not perfect prints, I know. But nowadays I would do better...😃

And 212 of these wheels were needed for this project. All 50 carriages were also printed in PLA. Each carriage weigh 14gram.

 

[DaveS]

Colorfabb aren't delivering to the UK until the chaos engendered by Brexit and HMRC's crass stupidity is sorted out. Not holding my breath.

[PeterW]

Would expect that Protopasta might do the same, though I’ve got some reels of their material unused, so should he OK for a while.

Peter

[CedricTheBrave]

Super impressed with my Cr10s Pro V2!

its been really easy to setup and get some prints out and the quality of the print has been amazing.

great bit of kit

[JamesF]

Resurrecting this thread, today my first 3d printer appears to have died.

I managed one print this morning, but during a second the printer just stopped for a few seconds and then restarted, by which time it had become confused about where the print head was and rammed most of the motors against the stops before I could hit the button to stop.  It stopped permanently during another try.  I powercycled everything and it looked like it was all ok again at first, but neither the bed nor print head would come up to temperature and the fans won't run at full speed.  The LCD display stopped working quite some time back, so I've decided to replace it.

Tempting as the CR10 is, I'm not sure I want to spend that much and I don't really have the need for the larger print bed for the time being, so I've gone for the Ender 3 V2.

Not sure what might be wrong with the existing printer at the moment.  When I have time I'll tinker with it and see if it can be brought back to life.

James

[Mognet]

Everything going at once sounds like a motherboard or control board issue. They should be fairly easy to replace

 

[JamesF]

7 minutes ago, Mognet said:

Everything going at once sounds like a motherboard or control board issue. They should be fairly easy to replace

I'm thinking so, but if I'm going to replace it then I'll probably look at upgrading it to add a fan for the print head and so on, at which point it's become a larger, more time-consuming project and I want to get back to printing things :)

James

[Steve Clay]

Sounds like the motherboard.  Easy and cheap to replace.

I have the V2 ender 3 and it's great. When building it don't tighten the frame bolts tight until you have it all square. Otherwise you'll never level the bed. There's numerous utube videos about it.

Steve

[JamesF]

My new toy arrived today and I have it assembled and powered up.  I'm generally very impressed with the build quality, I have to say.  Not so much with the assembly instructions

I've gone as far as finding the "home" position, but I've not determined if the "disable stepper" menu option means I can move the motors freely by hand  yet, so I need to do a bit more reading first (and I also need to raise the print head so I can remove the protective plastic sheet from the glass bed.

James

[Mognet]

I found the instructions for my CR10s a bit lacking too. A quick Google gave me a YouTube video on build and setup. There has been a good community built up around the Creality printers so advice is never hard to find

11 hours ago, JamesF said:

I've not determined if the "disable stepper" menu option means I can move the motors freely by hand  yet

Disable steppers does mean exactly that. When they are off they are all freely movable by hand. Although it's probably better to use the controls to move the gantry up and down because of the lead screws and disturbing their alignment

[JamesF]

Having levelled the bed I'm now doing my first "proper" print.  The motors are impressively quiet compared with my old one.  The fans (particularly the internal one, I think) more than makes up for that though.  It won't be staying sitting on my desk beyond the end of this print run :)

James

[JamesF]

Looks like Creality use the Ultimaker slicer, and as it happens there's a copy of the Ultimaker slicer available for Linux which means I could do away with an old Windows laptop that I currently use for slicing.  So I downloaded and installed it.  And it crashed as soon as I tried to open a file :(

James

[Mognet]

55 minutes ago, JamesF said:

Looks like Creality use the Ultimaker slicer, and as it happens there's a copy of the Ultimaker slicer available for Linux which means I could do away with an old Windows laptop that I currently use for slicing.  So I downloaded and installed it.  And it crashed as soon as I tried to open a file :(

James

The Creality slicer is a front end onto Cura Engine, but it's usually easier to use Cura, and it gives a lot more options. I've not had any problems running the AppImage of the latest versions in Linux Mint. Good news is that the Windows executable version can be run under Wine if you want to go that route

[JamesF]

I tried the snap install, but not the app image.  I discovered though that an earlier release is available as a .deb, so I tried that and it seems to work fine.  On windows it tells me that v4.9 is available, which isn't the case for Linux, so perhaps if I wait for that the problem will go away anyhow.

I'm pleased with the print I've just done.  Comparing it to the one from my other printer, the bed adhesion is better and the quality of the surfaces where supports have been removed is better.  Part of the latter is down to the different slicing engine I imagine, but also because of the print head fan.  I wonder if the slightly textured surface of the Ender3 print bed helps with adhesion over the smooth glass of the old printer.  I would also say that the top surface is better finished.  There's not a lot in it, but with the Ender3 print I have to feel for unevenness in the top face, whereas it's obvious with the print from the Geeetech Prusa copy.  Where the top surface is a small area, such as the top of a vertical peg, the Ender3 finish is clearly much better.

I'll have to try to find something that was quite difficult to print well on the Geeetech and see how the Ender3 does.

James

[adyj1]

2 hours ago, JamesF said:

Having levelled the bed I'm now doing my first "proper" print.  The motors are impressively quiet compared with my old one.  The fans (particularly the internal one, I think) more than makes up for that though.  It won't be staying sitting on my desk beyond the end of this print run

James

I soon cracked open the psu on my ender 5 and mounted an external quiet 120cm pc 12v fan (with 24v-12v step-down).

Much better! (if you're confident with not electrocuting yourself when messing with electronics...) 

[JamesF]

3 minutes ago, adyj1 said:

Much better! (if you're confident with not electrocuting yourself when messing with electronics...) 

Well, I've sworn a bit and said "Damn!  That gave me quite a buzz!" once or twice over the last fifty-odd years.  I reckon that probably counts.

It may run in the family, actually.  Apparently my younger bother developed quite a reputation for attempting to poke screwdrivers into thirteen amp sockets as a toddler.

James

[adyj1]

5 minutes ago, JamesF said:

Well, I've sworn a bit and said "Damn!  That gave me quite a buzz!" once or twice over the last fifty-odd years.  I reckon that probably counts.

It may run in the family, actually.  Apparently my younger bother developed quite a reputation for attempting to poke screwdrivers into thirteen amp sockets as a toddler.

James

I hope he only earthed himself!

Realised as I typed my first response that a warning was probably in order for a public post, but at the same time didn't really think you'd need it 😉 

[Mognet]

18 minutes ago, JamesF said:

I tried the snap install, but not the app image.  I discovered though that an earlier release is available as a .deb, so I tried that and it seems to work fine.  On windows it tells me that v4.9 is available, which isn't the case for Linux, so perhaps if I wait for that the problem will go away anyhow.

There's an AppImage of 4.9. Not seen the snap images or deb files for a while. Do you know what version it is that's crashing? There were problems with the 3.x versions (I think) where they would crash on startup or cause a BSOD

[JamesF]

10 hours ago, Mognet said:

There's an AppImage of 4.9. Not seen the snap images or deb files for a while. Do you know what version it is that's crashing? There were problems with the 3.x versions (I think) where they would crash on startup or cause a BSOD

It's 4.8 that's crashing for me.  The .deb file is for 4.4.1.  I'll have a go with the AppImage.

James

[AbsolutelyN]

I've recently got my first 3d printer - an Ender 3 Max and am very pleased with it. 

[StevieDvd]

On 08/05/2021 at 00:42, JamesF said:

My new toy arrived today and I have it assembled and powered up.  I'm generally very impressed with the build quality, I have to say.  Not so much with the assembly instructions

I've gone as far as finding the "home" position, but I've not determined if the "disable stepper" menu option means I can move the motors freely by hand  yet, so I need to do a bit more reading first (and I also need to raise the print head so I can remove the protective plastic sheet from the glass bed.

James

Mine arrived yesterday and assembled it last night, too late to do the test print. I was a little wary about the levelling, as one side needed a lot more adjusting than the other, leaving the adjuster very loose to get the nozzle near to the plate. I double checked the height above the bed of the 'z' arm and adjusted this by loosening the screws on the 'z' passive block and made sure each side of the bed was the same height.

That last adjustment improved the bed levelling and I proceeded with the test dog print which came out virtually perfect.

Now wondering if I should have gone for the BL touch as well to be safer.

Also had 3 of the black bolts left over and had to triple check if they were spares or I'd missed something.

First proper print should be some casing for arduino based focuser motor boards.

 

[JamesF]

I had to move the block down a little for the Z axis too.  That may all change again though, as I decided to replace the springs for bed levelling on my older printer because bed levelling was always a bit vague and there are enough to do this one as well.

And I also had three of the black bolts left over :)

I've just changed the filament which was a little more awkward than on my old one (which was direct feed rather than Bowden), but that may just be me not being used to it.

James

[StevieDvd]

14 minutes ago, JamesF said:

I had to move the block down a little for the Z axis too.  That may all change again though, as I decided to replace the springs for bed levelling on my older printer because bed levelling was always a bit vague and there are enough to do this one as well.

And I also had three of the black bolts left over

I've just changed the filament which was a little more awkward than on my old one (which was direct feed rather than Bowden), but that may just be me not being used to it.

James

I'll need extensive training to change the filament 😀 based on the fact I was puzzled why there was nothing coming out of the print nozzle - it helped when I pushed the filament into the tubing rather than just the feeder head where it had not even got into the feed hole. I thought it was automatic, doh.

I ma change the springs and get the BL Touch too as I may not be leaving the printer in the same location,  just moving to a flat table when needed. But not until I've got the cases designed and printed.