3D Printer Hot Off The Griddle

April 5, 2024 by 9 Comments

If you look at [Proper Printing’s] latest video — see below — you’ll immediately get the idea behind his latest printer. There are two heads on two separate gantries, which, of course, opens up many possibilities. But when you think you’ve seen enough, you find out the heated bed is a kitchen griddle, and… well, for us, we had to keep watching.

The heated bed idea was interesting, although the flatness left something to be desired. While it is a simple idea, getting the two gantries to move reliably across the hotbed griddle took a lot of parts and a careful design. We wonder how evenly the griddle heats — ours definitely has hot spots when we cook with it.

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Wear Testing Different 3D Printer Filaments

April 2, 2024 by 5 Comments

Over the couple of decades or so since it started to be available at an affordable level, 3D printing has revolutionized the process of making custom objects. But as anyone with a 3D printer will know, sometimes the materials don’t quite live up to the application. There is a huge variety of available filaments to help make better prints, but which one really is the most hard-wearing? [My Tech Fun] set out to measure the resistance to wear of a variety of different 3D printed materials.

The test takes a standard print made across a variety of different materials, and several of each using different manufacturers’ offerings. These are then put on a test rig that moves backward and forward twice a second, with the test piece rubbing against a steel shaft under pressure from a 2.5 kg weight.

As might be expected, the common and cheap PLA performed the worst while PETG, PA, and TPU performed the best. But for us the interesting part comes in the variance between brands; the best PLA sample outperforms the worst ABS and nearly equals the worst of the PETG. Proof that maybe you do get what you pay for.

The whole test is well worth a watch, and if you 3D print anything that might be subjected to mechanical stress you should find it to be of interest. If comparing filaments is something you’d like to see more of, we’ve featured some tests before.

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Fire Up The 3D Printer And Build Yourself A Spiderbot

April 1, 2024 by 12 Comments

Robots are cool, so check out [Atlin Anderson]’s Spiderbot (video, embedded below) which can be made with 3D printed parts, hobby servos, and ESP32-CAM module for control and a first-person view. Looking for a new project? All of the design details are shared online if you’d like to make a hexapod of your own.

We like the effort [Atlin] put into minimizing hardware fasteners in the design of the 3D-printed parts, and aiming for a modular concept that leaves things open for expansion or modification. There’s plenty of room in the chassis for more hardware, with a convenient peg system for snap-fitting assemblies.

Control is done wirelessly via a mobile phone with an app created using the MIT App Inventor, a fantastic tool that is still going strong as a capable and accessible way to make an Android app.

As for the ESP32-CAM module that drives it all, it is a great piece of hardware with capabilities that are leveraged very nicely here. We’ve seen other projects make good use of it as well, from this 1/64 scale micro RC car to an oddball tripod camera robot.

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3D Printing Computer Space

March 31, 2024 by 6 Comments

The first computer game available as a commercial arcade cabinet is unsurprisingly, a rare sight here in 2024. Nolan Bushnel and Ted Dabney’s 1971 Computer Space was a flowing fiberglass cabinet containing a version of the minicomputer game Spacewar! running on dedicated game hardware. The pair would of course go on to found the wildly successful Atari, leaving their first outing with its meager 1500 units almost a footnote in their history.

Unsurprisingly with so relatively few produced, few made it out of the United States, so in the UK there are none to be found. [Arcade Archive] report on a fresh build of a Computer Space cabinet, this time not in fiberglass but via 3D printed plastic.

The build itself is the work of [Richard Horne], and in the video he takes us through the design process before printing the parts and then sticking them all together to make the cabinet. Without a real machine to scan or measure he’s working from photographs of real machines, working out dimensions by reference to other cabinets such as PONG that appear alongside them. The result is about as faithful a model of the cabinet as could be made, and it’s cut into the many pieces required for 3D printing before careful assembly.

This is the first in a series, so keep following them to see a complete and working Computer Space take shape.

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3D Printing With (Ersatz) Moon Dust

March 27, 2024 by 29 Comments

When the people of Earth set up bases on the moon, you can imagine that 3D printing will be a key enabling technology. Of course, you could ship plastic or other filament at great cost. But what if you could print with something you can already find on the moon? Like moon dust. NASA thinks it is possible and has been doing tests on doing just that. Now [Virtual Foundry] wants to let you have a shot at trying it yourself. It doesn’t really contain moon dust, but their Basalt Moon Dust Filamet has a similar composition. You can see a video about the material below.

It isn’t cheap, but it is probably cheaper than going up there to get some yourself. At least for now. The company is known for making PLA with various metal and ceramic materials. Like their other filaments, you print it more or less like PLA, although you need a large hardened nozzle, and they suggest a prewarmer to heat the filament before going to the hot end.

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3D Printing Real Wood With Just Cellulose And Lignin

March 27, 2024 by 23 Comments

Although the components of wood – cellulose and lignin – are exceedingly cheap and plentiful, combining these into a wood-like structure is not straightforward, despite many attempts to make these components somehow self-assemble. A recent attempt by [MD Shajedul Hoque Thakur] and colleagues as published in Science Advances now may have come closest to 3D printing literal wood using cellulose and lignin ink, using direct ink writing (DIW) as additive manufacturing method.

Microstructures of 3D-printed wood after printing and post-printing operations. (Credit: Thakur et al., 2024)
Microstructures of 3D printed wood after printing and post-printing operations. (Credit: Thakur et al., 2024)

This water-based ink was created by mixing TOCN (tempo-oxidized cellulose nanofiber), a 10.6 wt % aqueous CNC (cellulose nanocrystals) and lignin in a 15:142:10 ratio, giving it roughly the viscosity of clay. The purpose of having both TOCNs and CNCs is to replicate the crystalline and amorphous cellulose elements of wood-based cellulose.

This ink was printed from a syringe head (SDS-60) installed in a Hyrel 3D Engine HR 3D printer. This printer is much like your average FDM printer, just targeting bioprinting and a wide range of heads to print and handle various attachments in a laboratory setting. The ink was extruded into specific shapes that were either freeze dried to get rid of the liquid component, or additionally also heated (at 180°C), with a third set of samples put into a hot press. These additional steps seem to promote the binding of the lignin and create a more durable result.

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Glow Plug Turned Metal-Capable 3D Printer Hotend

March 15, 2024 by 37 Comments

At this point, most readers will be familiar with fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printers, and how a plastic filament is pushed through a heater and deposited as liquid through a nozzle. Most of us also know that there are a huge variety of materials that can be FDM printed, but there’s one which perhaps evades us: you can’t load a spool of metal wire into your printer and print in metal, or at least you can’t yet. It’s something [Rotoforge] is working on, with a project to make a hot end that can melt metal. Their starting point is a ceramic diesel engine glow plug, from which they expect 1300 C (2372 F).

The video below the break deals with the process of converting the glow plug, which mostly means stripping off the metal parts which make it a glow plug, and then delicately EDM drilling a hole through its ceramic tip. The video is well worth a watch for the in-depth examination of how they evolved the means to do this.

Sadly they aren’t at the point of printing metal with this thing, but we think the current progress is impressive enough to have a good chance of working. Definitely one to watch.

Previous metal 3D printers we’ve featured have often used a MIG welder.

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