Resin Cleanup: A Sticky Situation

September 13, 2022 by Al Williams 10 Comments

We’ll admit it. We like the results of resin 3D printing, but we don’t always care for the mess. We aren’t alone, and a common issue is to have drips of resin on your LCD screen — a potential disaster. You ought to have a screen protector, but yeah… you should back up hard drives, too. [Jessy] has the same problem and he has heard that you can easily clean cured resin from the screen using wood glue. Does it work? Check out the results of three glues in the video below.

We winced to see glue going on the screens. [Jessy] cured some resin on the screens deliberately for a test. He used Elmer’s wood glue, Gorilla wood glue, and Titebond II wood glue. While there is a bit of a price difference between the options, they are all fairly inexpensive.

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3D Printing For Textile Work

September 11, 2022 by Al Williams 7 Comments

While it isn’t for everyone, some of the best creators we know are experts at working with textiles. While the art is ancient, it isn’t easy and requires clever tools. [Lauren] collected a few 3D prints that can help you with knitting, crochet, and even a knitting loom.

Some of the designs are pretty basic like the yarn bowl, or pretty easy to figure out like the simple machine for re-spooling wool. We were frankly surprised that you can 3D print a crochet hook, although the post does mention that breaking them is a real problem.

We were really impressed though, with the sock knitting machine. There are actually a few of these out there, and you can see a similar one in the video below. Of course, like a RepRap printer, it needs “vitamins” in the form of metal rods, fasteners, and the like. There’s also a portable knitting loom which looked interesting.

We aren’t adept enough with fabric arts to know if these tools are serious contenders compared to commercial products, but we have to admit the sock knitting machine looks like it could be. We recently saw a sophisticated loom, although that might be a bit more than most people need. We have looked at open-source knitting machines, too. Of course, if you’d rather not create with textiles, you can always 3D print on them, instead.

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Full Transparency: Stronger FDM Prints

September 11, 2022 by Al Williams 7 Comments

We always look forward to [Stefan’s] CNC Kitchen videos. They are usually useful, but always carefully thought out and backed with experimental data. His latest is about creating transparent and strong FDM prints. You normally don’t associate the FDM process with clear prints even with clear filament. The problem is the filament doesn’t lay down in a particular structure, so light scatters producing a sort of white color. However, [Stefan] found a post on Printables called “How to Print Glass” which changes the structure of the part and, of course, [Stefan] wanted to see if the process also led to stronger parts.

The process is slow and the basic idea is to use no top and bottom layers. The entire part is essentially infill. You also need to set the infill to go in the same direction for each layer. As [Stefan] mentions, there have been other efforts to make transparent parts, especially in vase mode. Of course, you can also get transparent parts using resin printing, although it isn’t always as easy as you might think.

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The Filamentmeter: For When You Absolutely Want To Count Every Meter Used

September 9, 2022 by Donald Papp 17 Comments

[ArduinoNmore] took an interesting approach to designing a counter intended to accurately display how many meters of filament a 3D printer has used. The Filamentmeter looks a little bit like a 3D printed handheld tally counter (or lap counter) but instead of a button to advance each digit, the readout represents how many meters of filament have gone through the extruder.

Driving the digit rotation from the extruder motor itself means that even retractions are accounted for.

At first glance it may look like there is a motor hidden inside, or that the device is somehow sensing the filament directly. But it’s actually the movement of the extruder motor that drives the device. A small spur gear attached to the printer’s extruder drives a series of gears that advance the digits. This means that retractions — small reverses of the extruder motor during printing — are properly accounted for in the total, which is a nice touch.

[ArduinoNmore] designed this for the Ender 3, and the Filamentmeter relies on a specific extruder design and orientation to work properly. Of course, since it’s 3D printed, modifying the design for your own purposes should be pretty straightforward.

Curious? The design is being sold for a few bucks, and there is a free test piece one can print and use to confirm whether the design will work before mashing the buy button. Non-free printable 3D models can be a world of buyer beware, but test pieces and solid documentation are good ways to give buyers confidence in your work.

The insides of the unit are really quite intricate, with a clockwork-type elegance to them. You can see it all in the short video, embedded below.

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Food Safe 3D Printing: A Study

September 5, 2022 by Dave Rowntree 43 Comments

[Matt Thomas] wanted to answer the question of whether 3D printed structures can be food-safe or even medical-safe, since there is an awful lot of opinion out there but not a lot of actual science about the subject. As a mechanical engineer who dabbles in medical technical matters, he designed as series of tests using a wide range of nasty-sounding pathogens, to find once and for all what works and what does not.

One common argument sprung up from the maker movement response to COVID-19, 3D printed masks and visors. Many of us (this scribe included) printed many thousands of visor frames and ear protectors, using the armies of 3D printers we had available, then distributed them to nursing homes and doctors’ surgeries, and anywhere else that couldn’t get ‘proper’ medical-grade items.

There was much opinion about the risks associated with contamination of such 3D printed structures, due to the allegedly porous nature of the prints. [Matt] has shown with some SEM imaging, that a typical 3D print does not have any detectable porosity, and that the grooves due to the layer lines are so positively huge compared to your average bacterium, as to also be irrelevant.

Cutting to the chase, [Matt] shows that ordinary dish soap and water are totally sufficient to remove 90% or more of all of the pathogens he tested, and that using a mix of culturing swap samples as well as protein detection, that 3D printed parts could be cleaned close to medical standards, let alone those of food handling. Even those pesky biofilms could be quickly dispatched with either a quick rinse in bleach-water or a scrub with baking soda. Does this article clear this up finally? Only you can decide!

We’ve obviously covered the subject of 3D printing masks a fair bit, but it’s not all about PPA, sometimes ventilators need some 3D printing love too. Prusa did some work on the subject of food safety, looking specifically at post-processing for 3D prints, and produced some interesting results.

Thanks to [Keith] for the tip!

Nevermore Is What You Get When Engineers Design Air Filters For 3D Printers

September 3, 2022 by Donald Papp 25 Comments

What happens when an air filter for 3D printers gets designed by engineers with a passion for function, a refusal to compromise, and a desire to do without bad smells or fumes? You get the Nevermore, a design for a recirculating active-carbon filtration system to deal with VOCs (volatile organic compounds) from 3D printing.

3D-printable parts and an easy-to-fill chamber for bulk-activated carbon make this recirculating air filter for VOCs a smart, space-saving design.

The Nevermore Micro (and larger Nevermore Max) were originally intended to complement the Voron 3D printer design, but are made such that they can be used with just about anything else. These filters use 3D-printable parts, and are designed to be easily filled (and refilled) using bulk-activated carbon instead of some kind of proprietary pre-packed filter like most commercial offerings. The Voron project is all about a printer without compromises, and the Nevermore comes from that same design ethos.

A Nevermore filter sits inside the build chamber, and works by recirculating air inside while passing it through the activated carbon. The idea is that by concentrating on dealing with the problem at the source inside a relatively small build chamber, one doesn’t need a lot of airflow. A small recirculating air filter can do the job efficiently, though for best results, the build chamber should be as sealed as possible.

One interesting caution is that it seems not all activated carbon is the same, and it is absolutely crucial to use only acid-free, steam-activated (not acid-washed) carbon in a recirculating filter like the Nevermore. There are horrifying photos of oxidized metal surfaces resulting from using acid-residue carbon, some of which took only minutes to occur. Thankfully, there are pointers to trusted sources for the known-good stuff.

It’s known that 3D printing results in chemical and particle emissions. These differ significantly depending on both material and type of printer, but it’s enough of an issue to warrant attention. One deals with particulates with something like a HEPA filter, but VOCs require a carbon filter. This is where the Nevermore comes in. Active carbon filters will wear out simply from exposure to the air, so if one is serious about cleaning VOCs when printing, it is definitely worth looking into bulk carbon with a design like the Nevermore.

Custom Printed Knobs In Just A Few Lines Of Code

August 30, 2022 by Tom Nardi 25 Comments

While not everyone is necessarily onboard for the CAD-via-code principle behind OpenSCAD, there’s no denying the software lends itself particularly well to parametric designs. Using a few choice variables, it’s possible to make a model in OpenSCAD that can be easily tweaked by other users — even if they have zero prior experience with CAD.

Take for example this parametric-knob-maker written by [aminGhafoory]. The code clocks in at less than 100 lines, but if you’re looking to spin up your own version, all you really need to pay attention to are the clearly labeled variables up at the top. Just plug in your desired diameter and height, fiddle around a bit with the values that get fed into the grip generating function, and hit F7 to export it to an STL ready for printing.

Now admittedly, all the knobs generated with this code will look more or less the same. But that’s the beauty of open source, should you want to print out some wild looking knobs, you can at least use this code as a basis to build on. With the core functionality in place, you just need to concern yourself with writing a new function to generate a grip texture more to your liking.

Of course, if you want to make your OpenSCAD designs even easier for others to modify, you’ll want to look into its impressive customizer capability which replaces manually edited variables with friendly sliders and text input boxes. Projects like the Ultimate Box Maker we looked at back in 2018 are an excellent example of how powerful OpenSCAD can be if you give your design the proper forethought.