[Claywoven] mostly prints with ceramics, although he does produce plastic inserts for functional parts in his designs. The ceramic parts have an interesting texture, and he wondered if the same techniques could work with plastics, too. It turns out it can, as you can see in the video below.
Ceramic printing, of course, doesn’t get solid right away, so the plastic can actually take more dramatic patterns than the ceramic. The workflow starts with Blender and winds up with a standard printer.
Kumiko is a form of Japanese woodworking that uses small cuts of wood (probably offcuts) to produce artful designs. It’s the kind of thing that takes zen-like patience to assemble, and years to master– and who has time for that? [Paper View] likes the style of kumiko, but when all you have is a 3D printer, everything is extruded plastic.
His video, embedded below, focuses mostly on the large tiled piece and the clever design required to avoid more than the unavoidable unsightly seams without excessive post processing. (Who has time for that?) The key is a series of top pieces to hide the edges where the seams come together. The link above, however, gives something more interesting, even if it is on Makerworld.
[Paper View] has created a kumiko-style (out of respect for the craftspeople who make the real thing, we won’t call this “kumiko”) panel generator, that allows one to create custom-sized frames to print either in one piece, or to assemble as in the video. We haven’t looked at MakerWorld’s Parametric Model Maker before, but this tool seems to make full use of its capabilities (to the point of occasionally timing out). It looks like this is a wrapper for OpenScad (just like Thingiverse used to do with Customizer) so there might be a chance if enough of us comment on the video [Paper View] can be convinced to release the scad files on a more open platform.
We’ve featured kumiko before, like this wood-epoxy guitar, but for ultimate irony points, you need to see this metal kumiko pattern made out of nails. (True kumiko cannot use nails, you see.)
Thanks to [Hari Wiguna] for the tip, and please keep them coming!
Continue reading “Careful Design Lets 3D Print Emulate Kumiko”
Multimaterial printing was not invented by BambuLabs, but love them or hate them the AMS has become the gold standard for a modern multi-material unit. [Daniel]’s latest Mod Bot video on the Box Turtle MMU (embedded below) highlights an open source project that aims to bring the power and ease of AMS to Voron printers, and everyone else using Klipper willing to put in the work.
The system itself is a mostly 3D printed unit that sits atop [Daniel]’s Voron printer looking just like an AMS atop a BambuLab. It has space for four spools, with motorized rollers and feeders in the front that have handy-dandy indicator LEDs to tell you which filament is loaded or printing. Each spool gets its own extruder, whose tension can be adjusted manually via thumbscrew. A buffer unit sits between the spool box and your toolhead.
Aside from the box, you need to spec a toolhead that meets requirements. It needs a PTFE connector with a (reverse) boden tube to guide the filament, and it also needs to have a toolhead filament runout sensor. The sensor is to provide feedback to Klipper that the filament is loaded or unloaded. Finally you will probably want to add a filament cutter, because that happens at the toolhead with this unit. Sure, you could try the whole tip-forming thing, but anyone who had a Prusa MMU back in the day can tell you that is easier said than done. The cutter apparently makes this system much more reliable.
Continue reading “Is Box Turtle The Open Source AMS We’ve Been Waiting For?”
It’s a question new makers often ask: “Should I start with a CNC machine or a 3D Printer?”– or, once you have both, every project gets the question “Should I use my CNC or 3D printer?” — and the answer is to both is, of course, “it depends”. In the video embedded below by [NeedItMakeIt] you can see a head-to-head comparison for one specific product he makes, CRATER, a magnetic, click-together stacking tray for tabletop gaming. (He says tabletop gaming, but we think these would be very handy in the shop, too.)
[NeedItMakeIt] takes us through the process for both FDM 3D Printing in PLA, and CNC Machining the same part in walnut. Which part is nicer is absolutely a matter of taste; we can’t imagine many wouldn’t chose the wood, but de gustibus non disputandum est–there is no accounting for taste. What there is accounting for is the materials and energy costs, which are both surprising– that walnut is cheaper than PLA for this part is actually shocking, but the amount of power needed for dust collection is something that caught us off guard, too.
Of course the process is the real key, and given that most of the video follows [NeedItMakeIt] crafting the CNC’d version of his invention, the video gives a good rundown to any newbie just how much more work is involved in getting a machined part ready for sale compared to “take it off the printer and glue in the magnets.” (It’s about 40 extra minutes, if you want to skip to the answer.) As you might expect, labour is by far the greatest cost in producing these items if you value your time, which [NeedItMakeIt] does in the spreadsheet he presents at the end.
What he does not do is provide an answer, because in the case of this part, neither CNC or 3D Printing is “better”. It’s a matter of taste– which is the great thing about DIY. We can decide for ourselves which process and which end product we prefer. “There is no accounting for taste”, de gustibus non disputandum est, is true enough that it’s been repeated since Latin was a thing. Which would you rather, in this case? CNC or 3D print? Perhaps you would rather 3D Print a CNC? Or have one machine to do it all? Let us know in the comments for that sweet, sweet engagement.
While you’re engaging, maybe drop us a tip, while we offer our thanks to [Al] for this one.
When seeing a story from MIT’s Lincoln Labs that promises 3D printing glass, our first reaction was that it might use some rare or novel chemicals, and certainly a super-high-tech printer. Perhaps it was some form of high-temperature laser sintering, unlikely to be within the reach of mere mortals. How wrong we were, because these boffins have developed a way to 3D print a glass-like material using easy-to-source materials and commonly available equipment.
The print medium is sodium silicate solution, commonly known as waterglass, mixed with silica and other inorganic nanoparticles. It’s referred to as an ink, and it appears to be printed using a technique very similar to the FDM printers we all know. The real magic comes in the curing process, though, because instead of being fired in a special furnace, these models are heated to 200 Celsius in an oil bath. They can then be solvent cleaned and are ready for use. The result may not be the fine crystal glass you may be expecting, but we can certainly see plenty of uses for it should it be turned into a commercial product. Certainly more convenient than sintering with a laser cutter.
Maybe your goal is to preserve the heyday of rail travel with a precise scale replica of a particular railroad station. Maybe you’re making a hyper-local edition of Monopoly in which the houses and hotels are the actual houses and hotels in your hometown.
Whatever the reason, if you have need for shrinkifying a building or other reasonably large object, there is (at least) one sure-fire way to do it, and [ nastideplasy ] is your guide with this tutorial on drone photogrammetry.
The process is essentially the same as any other photogrammetry you may have seen before—take lots of overlapping photos of an object from many different angles around it, stitch those photos together, make a 3D mesh by triangulating corresponding points from multiple photos—but this time the photos are captured by drone, allowing for much larger subjects, so long as you can safely and legally fly a drone around it.
The challenge, of course, is capturing a sufficient number of overlapping photos such that your reconstruction software can process them into a clean 3D mesh. Where purpose-built 3D scanners, automatic turntables, or a steady hand and lots of patience worked well at a smaller scale, skill with a pair of control sticks is the key to getting a good scan of a house.
[ nastideplasy ] also points out the importance of lighting. Direct sunlight and deep shadows can cause issues when processing the images, and doing this at night is almost certainly out of the question. Overcast days are your best bet for a clean scan.
The tutorial calls for software from Autodesk to stitch photos and clean up 3D meshes. We’ve also seen some excellent results with open source options like Meshroom as well.
PVA filament is an interesting filament type, for the reason that while it can be printed with any FDM printer, it supposedly readily dissolves in water, which is also the reason why PVA glue sticks are so popular when doing crafts and arts with young children. This property would make PVA filament ideal for printing supports if your printer can handle two different materials at the same time. So surely you can just pick any old PVA filament spool and get to printing, right? As [Lost in Tech] found out, this is not quite the case.
As an aside, watching PVA supports dissolve in water set to classical music (Bach’s Air from Orchestral Suite No. 3) is quite a pleasant vibe. After thus watching the various PVA prints dissolve for a while, we are left to analyze the results. The first interesting finding was that not every PVA filament dissolved the same way, or even fully.
The first gotcha is that PVA can stand for polyvinyl acetate (the glue stick) or polyvinyl alcohol (a thickener and stabilizer) , with the ‘PVA’ filament datasheets for each respective filament showing various combinations of both types of PVA. This results in wildly different properties per filament, both in terms of Shore hardness, their printability, as well as their ability to dissolve in water. Some of the filament types (Yousu, Reprapper) also have an outer layer and inner core for some reason.
Ultimately the message appears to be that ‘PVA’ filament requires a fair bit of research to have any chance of having a relatively trouble-free printing experience.
