M3D just launched their second 3D printer on Kickstarter. The M3D Pro offers more professional features than its predecessor, the M3D Micro, which is still one of cheapest 3D printers around. Despite the higher price of $499, the campaign reached its $100,000 funding goal within hours.
Many of the Fail Of The Week stories we feature here are pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. At worse, gears are ground, bits are broken, or the Magic Blue Smoke is released. This attempt to smooth a 3D print released far more than a puff of blue smoke, and was nearly a disaster of insurance adjuster or medical examiner proportions.
Luckily, [Maxloader] and his wife escaped serious injury, and their house came out mostly unscathed. The misadventure started with a 3D printed Mario statue. [Maxloader] had read acetone vapor can smooth a 3D print, and that warming the acetone speeds the process. Fortunately, his wife saw the looming danger and wisely suggested keeping a fire blanket handy, because [Max] decided to speed the process even more by putting a lid on the pot. It’s not clear exactly what happened in the pot – did the trapped acetone vapors burp the lid off and find a path to the cooktop burner? Whatever it was, the results were pretty spectacular and were captured on a security camera. The action starts at 1:13 in the video below. The fire blanket came in handy, buying [Max] a few seconds to open the window and send the whole flaming mess outside. Crisis averted, except for nearly setting the yard on fire.
What are we to learn from [Maxloader]’s nearly epic fail? First, acetone and open flame do not mix. If you want to heat acetone, do it outside and use an electric heat source. Second, a fire extinguisher is standard household equipment. Every house needs at least one, and doubly so when there’s a 3D printer present. And third, it’s best to know your filaments – the dearly departed Mario print was in PLA, which is best smoothed with tetrahydrofuran, not acetone.
Anything else? Feel free to flame away in the comments.
Continue reading “Fail Of The Week: How NOT To Smooth A 3D Print”
A personal bartender is hard to come by these days. What has the world come to when a maker has to build their own? [Pierre Charlier] can lend you a helping hand vis-à-vis with HardWino, an open-source cocktail maker.
The auto-bar is housed on a six-slot, rotating beverage holder, controlled by an Arduino Mega and accepts drink orders via a TFT screen. Stepper motors and L298 driver boards are supported on 3D printed parts and powered by a standard 12V DC jack. Assembling HardWino is a little involved, so [Charlier] has provided a thorough step-by-step process in the video after the break.
Continue reading “HardWino Takes The Effort Out Of Happy Hour”
We’re not sure what a typical weekend at [Walter]’s house is like, but we can probably safely assume that any activity taking place is at minimum accompanied by the hum of a 3D printer somewhere in the background.
Those of us who 3D print have had our experiences with bad rolls of filament. Anything from filament that warps when it shouldn’t to actual wood splinters mixed in somewhere in the manufacturing process clogging up our nozzles. There are lots of workarounds, but the best one is to not buy bad filament in the first place. To this end [Walter] has spent many hours cataloging the results of the different filaments that have made it through his shop.
We really enjoyed his comparison of twleve different yellow filaments printed side by side with the same settings on the same printer. You can really see the difference high dimensional tolerance, the right colorant mix, and good virgin plastic stock makes to the quality of the final print. Also, how transparent different brands of transparent actually are as well as the weight of spools from different brands (So you can weigh your spool to see how much is left).
The part we really liked was his list every filament he’s experienced in: PLA, ABS, PETG, Flexible, Nylon, Metal, Wood, and Other. This was a massive effort, and while his review is naturally subjective, it’s still nice to have someone else’s experience to rely on when figuring out where to spend your next thirty dollars.
Sometimes, a simple fix is the best solution. Lacking extra funds for a proper remote-controlled gate-opener after the recent purchase of their farm, redditor [amaurer3210] built one as a birthday gift for his wife.
Supported on pillow block housings, a 10″ wheel is connected to the motor by via a 3D printed pulley and a timing belt turned inside-out to allow for slippage — in case of obstacles or manual opening of the gate. If you’ve ever worked with belts in your builds, [amaurer3210] adds that during sizing he uses a few layers of fiberglass tape as a stand-in for the belt to avoid frustration over final belt size and tension.
Continue reading “Remote-Operated Gate On A Budget”
[Sam Barrett] is doing something that is sorely needed. He’s doing real materials research on FDM parts.
There’s nothing wrong with the rough experiments like hanging a 1 L bottle of water from the end of a rectangular test print to compare strengths. We also have our rules-of-thumb, like expecting the print to perform at 30% of injection molded strength. But these experiments are primitive and the guidelines are based on hearsay. Like early metallurgy or engineering; 3D printing is full of made-up stuff.
What [Sam] has done here is really amazing. He’s produced a model of a printed ABS part and experimentally verified it to behave close enough to the real thing. He’s also set a method for testing and proposed a new set of questions. If it couldn’t be better, he also included his full research notebook. Make sure to read the FDMProperties-report (PDF) in the files section of Hackaday.io.
If research like this is being done elsewhere, it’s either internal to a large 3D printer manufacturer, or it’s behind a paywall so thorough only the Russians can help a regular peasant get through to them. Anyone with access to a materials testing lab can continue the work (looking at you every single engineering student who reads this site) and begin to help everyone achieve an understanding of 3D printed parts that could lead to some really cool stuff one day.
