Frozen Rat Kidney Shipping Container

June 17, 2018 by Elliot Williams 6 Comments

The biggest allure of 3D printing, to us at least, is the ability to make hyper-personalized objects that would otherwise fall through the cracks of our mass-market economy. Take, for instance, the Frozen Rat Kidney Shipping Container, or maybe some of the less bizarro applications in the US National Institute of Health’s 3D Print Exchange.

The Exchange is dominated, at least in terms of sheer numbers, by 3D models of proteins and other biochemical structures. But there are two sections that will appeal to the hacker in you: prosthetics and lab equipment. Indeed, we were sent there after finding a nice model of a tray-agitator that we wanted to use for PCB etching. We haven’t printed one yet, but check out this flexible micropositioner.

While it’s nowhere near as comprehensive a resource as some other 3D printing model sites, the focus on 3D printing for science labs should really help those who have that particular itch to find exactly the right scratcher. Or a tailor-made flexible container for slicing frozen rat kidneys. Whatever you’re into. We don’t judge.

Man with skull image: [jaqtikkun]

3D Printer Tech Cuts Paper

June 16, 2018 by Al Williams 18 Comments

While 3D printing has been a great thing all by itself, it has also made electromechanical hardware a commodity item. Instead of raiding an old printer for motors and rods of unknown provenance, you can now buy everything very inexpensively due to the economy of scale and offshore manufacturing.

[Mr. Innovation] proves this point with his recent paper cutting machine which feeds and slices paper strips with user-selected width and quantity. He did steal one roller assembly from an old printer, but most of it is straight out of a 3D printer build. There’s NEMA stepper motors, modular motor driver boards, smooth rods, belts, and pulleys.

The blade of the cutter is just a standard snap off box cutter blade. It is angled so it doesn’t drag when the motor pulls it back to the home position after a cut. Honestly, we might have made the paper mechanism retract the paper a bit at that point, but that would be simple to add to the device’s firmware.

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MRI To 3D Print Gets Much Faster

June 15, 2018 by Al Williams 19 Comments

A surprising use of 3D printing has been in creating life-like models of human body parts using MRI or CT scans. Surgeons and other medical professionals can use models to plan procedures or assist in research. However, there has been a problem. The body is a messy complex thing and there is a lot of data that comes out of a typical scan. Historically, someone had to manually identify structures on each slice — a very time-consuming process — or set a threshold value and hope for the best. A recent paper by a number of researchers around the globe shows how dithering scans can vastly improve results while also allowing for much faster processing times.

As an example, a traditional workflow to create a 3D printed foot model from scan data took over 30 hours to complete including a great deal of manual intervention. The new method produced a great model in less than an hour.

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Smoothing PLA With Two Paints

June 15, 2018 by Al Williams 13 Comments

There was a time when most 3D printers used ABS plastic. It stinks, is probably bad for you, and tends to warp unless printed in a heated enclosure. So most people have gone to something else, mostly PLA. But ABS also dissolves in a readily-available solvent, acetone, and this is useful for smoothing the layer artifacts from a 3D print. [3DSage] has a technique that works for PLA or — he says — probably any filament. You can see what he’s doing in the video below.

The video starts out with a recap of things most Hackaday readers will already know. But hang in there because at about 1:20, he reveals his method.

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Slow Cooking Filament

June 3, 2018 by Al Williams 29 Comments

Getting good results from a 3D printer is like Goldilocks’ porridge. There are a lot of things that have to be just right. One common thing that gives people poor results is damp filament. This is especially insidious because the printer will work fine and then after some period time results degrade but it is no fault of the printer mechanics or electronics. There are many ways to attempt to dry filament, but [HydeTheJekyll] prefers using a slow cooker modified to operate with low air pressure.

We assume this works because the low pressure reduces the boiling point of water, allowing the water to boil off at temperatures that won’t distort the filament. The modifications aren’t very severe. You’ll need some hose and a pump along with some silicone caulk and petroleum jelly.

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Budget Dehydrator Gives Your Damp Filament A Second Chance

June 2, 2018 by Sonya Vasquez 24 Comments

If you’ve had the misfortune of leaving your 3D printer filament out on a muggy day or, heaven forbid: showering with it, it’s probably soaked up quite a bit of moisture. Moisture will do more than just make your printer sound like Rice Crispies, it’ll ruin surface finishes and cause the filament to string into thin wisps between separate geometries on the same layer. Luckily for us, though, both [SafetyGlassesRequired] and [Joe Mike Terranella] give us the breakdown on taking a pair of snippers and about $40 in cash to start drying out our filament far away from the possibility of ruining any nearby kitchen ovens.

If you’ve been circling the 3D printer community for a while, you might have already heard about this trick. But with the arrival of a curiously-culinary-looking contraption called PrintDry, we can’t let the elephant in the room keep silent for much longer. Rather than risk our own pennies and leave ourselves stranded with a device that only makes the jerky on the box cover, [SafetlyGlassesRequired] and [Joe Mike Terranella] kindly prove our suspicions for us once and for all: a food dehydrator works perfectly for drying all that filament that we left out in the rain!

Clumsiness aside, a dehydrator isn’t a bad investment in the long run. Not only can we keep our supply dry, we might just be able to give all that freebie filament (that we dug out of the trash) a second life by resetting it to a clean, dry state.

These dehyrdators will toast all that moisture out of your filament, but it wont keep them dry whilst printing. For that problem, you’ll need to summon a heated drybox like this one.

[Joe Mike’s] solution will run us about $40. If you can do better, let us know in the comments.

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Print Your Own Filament

June 2, 2018 by Al Williams 25 Comments

Ask anyone with a 3D printer what they make the most. They’ll probably say “trash.” There are extra pieces, stuff that oozes out of the extruder, support material, parts that didn’t stick to the bed, or just parts that needed a little tweaking to get right. No matter what you do, you are going to wind up with a lot of scraps. It would be great if you could recycle all this, and [3D Printing Nerd] looks at the FelFil Evo Filament extruder that promises it can do just that. You can see the video below.

As you’d expect, the device is a motorized auger that extrudes filament through a hot end not dissimilar to your printer’s hot end. You have to run a bag of special material through it first to clean out the plastic path. After that, you can create filament from standard pellets or pieces of old plastic.

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