Tool Changing 3D Printers Shouldn’t Break The Bank

July 18, 2020 by Jenny List 12 Comments

One of the Holy Grails of desktop 3D printing is the ability to print in multiple materials, for prints that mix colours or textures. There are printers with multi-way hot ends, add-ons that change your filament, or printers with tool changers, that swap hot ends as needed. [Amy] has taken the final route with her Hypercube, and her Doot Changer allows her to print in two materials with ease. Best of all, she tells us it only cost her $20 to make.

For those not familiar with Hypercube-style printers, they have a roughly cubic frame made using aluminium extrusion. On the rear upper rail are a couple of receptacles with metal locating pins onto which a hot-end unit can be slotted. The printer carriage has a magnetic coupling that can pick up or disengage a hot end from its receptacle at will, as can be seen in action in a short video clip.

All the parts can be found on Thingiverse, and there is a photo album with plenty of eye-candy should you wish to see more. Meanwhile as far as tool changers go, we’ve been there before in great depth.

Towards A 3D-Printed Neutrino Detector

June 30, 2020 by Moritz v. Sivers 7 Comments

Additive manufacturing techniques like fused deposition modeling, aka 3D printing, are often used for rapid prototyping. Another advantage is that it can create shapes that are too complex to be made with traditional manufacturing like CNC milling. Now, 3D printing has even found its way into particle physics as an international collaboration led by a group from CERN is developing a new plastic scintillator production technique that involves additive manufacturing.

A scintillator is a fluorescent material that can be used for particle detection through the flashes of light created by ionizing radiation. Plastic scintillators can be made by adding luminophores to a transparent polymer such as polystyrene and are usually produced by conventional techniques like injection molding.

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3D Printing Nuclear Reactors For Fun And Profit

June 8, 2020 by Maya Posch 18 Comments

Over the past decades, additive manufacturing (AM, also known as 3D printing) has become increasingly common in manufacturing processes. While immensely helpful in the prototyping of new products by allowing for rapid turn-around times between design and testing, these days additive manufacturing is used more and more often in the production of everything from small production runs of custom enclosures to hard to machine components for rocket engines.

The obvious advantage of additive manufacturing is that they use generic equipment and common materials as input, without requiring expensive molds as in the case of injection molding, or extensive, wasteful machining of raw materials on a lathe, mill, and similar equipment. All of the manufacturing gets reduced to a 3D model as input, one or more input materials, and the actual device that converts the 3D model into a physical component with very limited waste.

In the nuclear power industry, these benefits haven’t gone unnoticed, which has led to 3D printed parts being developed for everything from keeping existing plants running to streamlining spent fuel reprocessing and even the printing of entire nuclear reactors.

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Cast Metal From Prints To Solidify Childhood Memories

June 1, 2020 by Kristina Panos 32 Comments

As far as the hacker’s toolbox goes, the 3D printer is way up there in terms of utility. Sure, it takes time to learn the ins and outs of designing, slicing, and extruding, but after that, the world is pretty much your additive oyster. Follow those design dreams, or use it to replace the things that break. The icing on the cake? You can chase those dreams into other materials, because 3D prints can be used to cast metal.

[RetroTech Journal] wanted to fry up some rosette cookies, a Scandinavian delight from his youth that look a lot like fancy, personal funnel cakes. They’re made with special aluminium irons that shape the dough while it fries, as opposed to the jumbled chaos that is funnel cake.

Rosette irons come in a few traditional shapes, but once you get tired of those, it’s up to you to cast them in aluminium. And how would you go about doing that? By creating a firmly-packed sand mold using a mounted 3D print.

In the endlessly entertaining video after the break, [RetroTech Journal] takes you through the entire process from CAD to cookies. It has everything you could possibly want: LEGO stop-motion, claymation, a little bit of cooking, and a whole lot of knowledge. We can’t wait to see what comes next.

We’ve seen quite a few sand casting projects over the years, but this lathe is among the most useful.

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3D Printed Switch Uses Paperclip

May 21, 2020 by Al Williams 11 Comments

We live in a time when all manner of electronic components are practically a mouse click away. Still, we like to see people creating their own components. Maybe a stock part won’t fit or isn’t immediately available. Or maybe you just want to build it yourself, we get that. [Aptimex] shows off a design for a 3D printed slide switch that uses a paperclip for the contact material.

Of course, it had better be a metal paperclip and we’d make sure the shiny metal was pretty conductive. Of course, you could probably use thick wire to get the same effect. It sounds like [Aptimex] was inspired by an earlier Hackaday.io project that created a few different kinds of switches using similar techniques.

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Look Ma, No Support For My Floating Holes!

May 17, 2020 by Jenny List 21 Comments

Do you find supports to be annoying, when you use a 3D printer? A lot of time breaking away surplus pieces of plastic and then cleaning up the resulting ragged edges on your prints is certainly an unwelcome chore. But printing in free space is beyond the capabilities of even the most expensive printer, so it seems we’re stuck with supports for the foreseeable future. [Adam Haile] may have a solution to some support woes though, in the form of a clever technique for printing inset holes without support. His designs have a significant quantity of screw holes with inset heads, too far for the printer to bridge over so his technique breaks down the bridge into manageable smaller distances.

In the video below the break he shows how its done, with successive single layers that contain polygons bridging chords across the circle, with each layer approximating further to the final hole and the last holding the hole itself. Over a few layers the hole is created, without any support but with the minor inconvenience of a not perfectly flat inset. It’s a very clever idea, and one that we’d be interested to see further expanded upon by others.

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An All Lead Screw 3D Printer You Can Build Yourself

April 30, 2020 by Jenny List 35 Comments

There was a time when the curious hardware hacker had to build their own 3D printer, because commercial models were so expensive as to be unaffordable except by well-funded institutions. We’re fortunate then to live in an era in which a good quality off-the-shelf machine can be had without breaking the bank, but that is not to say that home-made 3D printers are a thing of the past. Instead the community of rapid prototyping experimenters continue to push the boundaries of the art, and from that we all benefit. An example comes from [Morgan Lowe], whose 3DLS lead screw driven 3D printer joins the freely downloadable designs to be found on Thingiverse.

If at first sight you think it looks a little familiar, you are correct, as it takes its frame design from the popular AM8 metal frame upgrade for the Anet A8 off-the-shelf printer. It draws heavily from other A8 upgrades, and brings in some parts such as the extruder and bed from the Creality Ender3. This is the beauty of incremental open source, and the result is a belt-free printer that does a decent-looking Benchy on the bench, and as a party piece manages to print a slightly more hairy little plastic boat when suspended at 45 degrees by a rope from the ceiling.

When dipping a toe into the world of home made 3D printers it’s interesting to take a look into some of the earlier Hackaday RepRap posts, and see how far we’ve come.