Salvaged Robot Arm Makes A Big 3d Printer

June 19, 2012 by Mike Szczys 34 Comments

Wow, building a precision 3d printer is amazingly easy if you can get your hands on an industrial-quality robot arm. [Dane] wrote in to tell us about this huge extruder printer made from an ’80s-era SCARA robot arm. It is capable of printing objects as large as 25″x12″x6.5″.

This 190 pound beast was acquired during a lab clean out. It was mechanically intact, but missing all of the control hardware. Building controllers was a bit of a challenge since the it’s designed with servo motors and precision feedback sensors. This is different from modern 3d printers which use stepper motors and no feedback sensors. A working controller was built up one component at a time, with a heated bed added to the mix to help prevent warping with large builds. We love the Frankenstein look of the controller hardware, which was mounted hodge-podge as each new module was brought online.

You can see some printing action in the clip after the break. A Linux box takes a design and spits out control instructions to the hardware.

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Tearing Apart A Hot Glue Gun For A 3D Printer

June 5, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 42 Comments

If you’re building a 3D printer, the most complicated part is the extruder. This part uses a series of gears to pull plastic filament off of a spool, heats it up, and squirts it out in a manner precise enough to build objects one layer at a time. [Chris] made his own extruder out of a hot glue gun and made it so simple we’re surprised we haven’t seen this build before.

The basic operations of a plastic extruder – pushing a rod of plastic through a heated nozzle – already exists in a hot glue gun available for $3 at WalMart. To build his printer, [Chris] tor apart the hot glue gun and mounted the nozzle on a piece of plywood. The hot glue sticks are fed into the nozzle with the help of a 3D printed gear and a stepper motor driver.

After the break, you can see [Chris]’s hot glue gun RepRap printing a 10cm cube. It’s not fast, but the quality is exceptional, especially considering he made it out of a hot glue gun.

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3d Printing, The New Frontier Of Piracy?

May 31, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 89 Comments

We’ve all heard the countless arguments about piracy in digital media. However, it appears that 3d printing or other rapid prototyping systems are bringing legal issues to a more physical world. The story goes like this: [Thomas] bought a 3d printer. He’s a big fan of warhammer figurines. He spends tons of time creating some custom warhammer figures, and uploads them to thingaverse. Games Workshop, the owners of Warhammer, unleashed the lawyers and had the items removed.

There are so many angles to this story, the mind boggles. If I were an artist, and someone else was uploading copies of my work, essentially stopping my revenue, it would suck. Then again, if I were lucky enough to have a fanatical fan base that spread the love for my product with excitement and zeal, I might want to encourage them. Neither of those thoughts however, cover the legal issue at the base here. We don’t have an answer for you. Sorry. You’ll probably be seeing this issue pop up more and more often in the future.

We encourage you to make our logo. Though we haven’t bothered to ask our lawyers.

3d Printing Ice Sculptures

May 30, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 18 Comments

[Jared Kotoff] asked an interesting question on Facebook. He asked if we had ever seen 3d printing in ice before. Though we couldn’t find anything in our archives, he managed to find a project that makes 3d printed ice sculptures. To do this, they actually print two materials inside a chamber that is -8 degrees Fahrenheit. The first material is Shortening Methyl Esther (SME) that is used as a scaffold or mold. The second material is just water, but the tip is heated to 68 degrees to keep it from freezing in the nozzle. They do two passes of water for every layer of SME, and scan with a laser and perform corrections after every five layers.

Once the print is completed, the sculpture has to be scraped clean of SME and then soaked in kerosine to remove the last of it. There are several pictures at the linked article, but sadly no video.

3D Printed Circuit Boards Using Conductive Ink

May 22, 2012 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

The thought of using a 3D printer to fabricate PCBs is tantalizing and the good news is that it’s a reality. This project shows that it’s possible to use a special printer head to apply traces to an extruded substrate.

This is similar to the point-to-point 3D printer circuits with one big upgrade. Now the traces can be printed directly onto the ABS using conductive ink. The process starts with the design files, which are used to model a substrate that has a trench for each trace. A Makerbot then prints out this model. Once complete, the ABS extruder head is swapped for a special ink head. Each trace is then filled with the conductive fluid, which is kept in place by the trench walls until it can dry. We think this improves on the trace printing techniques we’ve seen before because it doesn’t require your printer heat to use molten metals.

The circuit above uses printed traces for the high and low side of an LED circuit. It’s a bit rough at the edges, but it shows a lot of promise. Don’t miss the demo video embedded after the jump.

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3D Printing With Nylon For A More Useful Objects

May 22, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 34 Comments

[taulman] over on Instructables has been working on his own version of a 3D printer. Unlike the usual PLA or ABS filament all the RepRaps and Makerbots use, this printer uses nylon to make parts with very interesting properties.

Most extrusion printers are designed to print with ABS (a very hard plastic that melts around 220-230° C) or PLA (a somewhat softer plastic that melts at about 180° C). [taulman] is using Nylon 6, a very slippery and bendable plastic that melts around 320° C (about 600 degrees Fahrenheit). He’s doing this with a hot end of his own design and a ‘spiky’ extruder bolt that allows high-temperature thermoplastics to be extruded into any shape imaginable.

For the longest time, the 3D printer community has been using low-temperature thermoplastics such as PLA and ABS. There are obvious benefits to these materials: it’s pretty easy to source a spool of filament, and the low melting point of these plastics makes building a printer easier and safer. Now that [taulman] has the high-temperature plastic nut cracked, he’s moving on to easily-machiniable Delrin and transparent Polycarbonate. Very cool, and hopefully in a year’s time we’ll have a choice of what material to run in our printers.

After the break, there are a few videos [taulman] put up showing his printer at work and the properties of his 3D printed objects. It looks like [taulman] can print objects that are impossible on any other 3D printer we’ve seen; the flexible iPhone case probably couldn’t be made on any other DIY machine.

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3d Printing A Mini Lathe

May 21, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 21 Comments

While browsing on one of our regularly visited sites, RobotsDreams, we found this interesting little video. Here, [Sublime] is showing off his 3d printed mini lathe. In the video he mentions that all the files are available for download so you could make one for yourself, but there were unfortunately no links. A quick bit of googling and we found some more information. We found the project on Thiniverse, though reading through the comments it seems that [Sublime] no longer uses Thingiverse. You can now find the files on his GitHub account to make your own.

The design seems very solid and looks like it could handle some basic jobs. As [Sublime] points out in the video below, you already know what parts are going to wear out fast and can simply print a few extras to have on hand. While that may seem somewhat wasteful, he also points out that he’s using PLA which is compostable and much easier to recycle.

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