Embed Hardware Into 3D Prints, But Not In The Way You’re Thinking

April 30, 2023 by Donald Papp 9 Comments

[Christopher Helmke] is doing fantastic work in DIY systems for handling small hardware like fasteners, and that includes robotic placement of hardware into 3D prints. Usually this means dropping nuts into parts in mid-print so that the hardware is captive, but that’s not really the story here.

The really inventive part we want to highlight is the concept of reducing packaging and labor. Instead of including a zip-lock bag of a few bolts, how about embedding the bolts into a void in the 3D print, covered with a little snip-out retainer? Skip ahead to 1:54 in the video to see exactly what we mean. It’s a pretty compelling concept that we hope sparks a few ideas in others.

As clever as that concept is, the rest of the video is also worth a watch because [Christopher] shows off a DIY system that sits on top of his 3D printer and takes care of robotically placing the hardware in mid-print. He talks all about the challenges of such a system. It’s not perfect (yet), but seeing it in action is very cool.

We’ve recently seen a lot of fascinating stuff when it comes to [Christopher Helmke]’s automated handling of fasteners and similar hardware. His system makes rapid and accurate dispensing of bolts look easy, and his work on using compressed air to zip pieces around seems effective.

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Alternatives To Pins And Holes For 3D Printed Assemblies

April 29, 2023 by Lewin Day 34 Comments

When we have two 3D printed parts that need to fit together, many of us rely on pins and holes to locate them and fix them together. [Slant 3D] has explored some alternative ideas in this area that may open up new avenues for your own designs.

Their first idea was to simply chamfer the pins and holes. This allows the object to be printed in a different orientations without compromising the fit. It also makes the features less brittle and creates a broader surface for gluing. Another alternative is using fins and slots, which again add robustness compared to flimsy pins. By chamfering the edges of the fins, they can be printed vertically for good strength and easy location without the need for support material.

Neither option requires much extra fuss compared to typical pin-and-hole designs. Plus, both are far less likely to snap off and ruin your day. Be honest, we’ve all been there. Meanwhile, consider adding folded techniques to your repertoire, too.

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Cheap Deburring Tool Is Game Changer For 3D Printing

April 27, 2023 by Lewin Day 53 Comments

3D printing’s real value is that you can whip up objects in all kinds of whacky geometries with a minimum of fuss. However, there’s almost always some post-processing to do. Like many manufactured plastic objects, there are burrs, strings, and rough edges to deal with. Fussing around with a knife to remove them is a poor way to go. As explained by [Adrian Kingsley-Hughes] on ZDNet, a deburring tool is the cheap and easy solution to the problem.

If you haven’t used one before, a deburring tool simply consists of a curved metal blade that swivels relative to its straight handle. You can drag the curved blade over the edge of a metal, wooden, or plastic object, and it neatly pulls away the burrs. There’s minimal risk of injury, unlike when pulling a regular blade towards yourself. The curved, swiveling blade is much less liable to slip or jump, and if it does, it’s far less likely to cut you.

For plastic use, just about any old deburring tool will do. They last a long time with minimal maintenance. They will wear out faster when used on metals, but you can get replacement blades cheap if you happen to need them. It’s a tool every workshop should have, particularly given they generally cost less than $20.

Given the ugly edges and rafts we’re always having to remove from our 3D prints, it’s almost egregious that printers don’t come with them bundled in the box. They’re just a bit obscure when it comes to tools; this may in fact be the first time Hackaday’s ever covered one. If you’ve got your own quality-of-life hacks for 3D printing, sound off below, or share them on the tipsline! We have able staff waiting for your email.

3D Print For Extreme Temperatures (But Only If You’re NASA)

April 25, 2023 by Jenny List 23 Comments

At the level pursued by many Hackaday readers, the advent of affordable 3D printing has revolutionised prototyping, as long as the resolution of a desktop printer is adequate and the part can be made in a thermoplastic or resin, it can be in your hands without too long a wait. The same has happened at a much higher level, but for those with extremely deep pockets it extends into exotic high-performance materials which owners of a desktop FDM machine can only dream of.

NASA for example are reporting their new 3D printable nickel-cobalt-chromium alloy that can produce extra-durable laser-sintered metal parts that van withstand up to 2000 Fahrenheit, or 1033 Celcius for non-Americans. This has obvious applications for an organisation producing spacecraft, so naturally they are excited about it.

The alloy receives some of its properties because of its oxide-dispersion-strengthened composition, in which grains of metal oxide are dispersed among its structure. We’re not metallurgists here at Hackaday, but we understand that the inconsistencies in the layers of metal atoms caused by the oxides in the crystal structure of the alloy leads to a higher energy required for the structure to shear.

While these particular materials might never be affordable for us mere mortals to play with, NASA’s did previously look into how it could greatly reduce the cost of high-temperature 3D printing by modifying an existing open source machine.

Dual Extrusion Support Without PVA

April 12, 2023 by Al Williams 5 Comments

If you have an FDM printer that features multiple hotends or can otherwise switch between different filaments, you’ve surely thought about using the capability to lay down dedicated support material. Historically the filament of choice for this is PVA, since it can be dissolved in water once the print has finished. But if you’ve ever used it, you’ll know it’s not without its own challenges. Luckily, there may be an alternative — [ModBot] had heard that it is possible to use PLA to support PETG and vice-versa so he decided to try it. You can see how it works in the video below.

Of course, you can simply use PLA to support PLA and PETG to support PETG. Depending on the supports and slicer settings, though, it can be hard to remove the support after printing cleanly. Slicers have made major improvements in this area, but it still isn’t ideal. Some use HIPS for support, but that requires a solvent to dissolve and is also a bit exotic compared to PLA and PETG.

To illustrate, [ModBot] printed some test articles with the alternate support and did more reference prints using the same material with different parameters. The typical gap slicers use is 0.2 mm, but when using the different materials you can set the gap to zero. For the reference parts he set the gap to zero and 0.1 mm, both closer than you would normally print.

The PLA-only prints were essentially impossible to separate. While the PETG prints separated with tools, the resulting surfaces were ugly, with support residue and scarring. But the prints with two materials and zero gap pulled apart readily with no tools and left a beautiful surface underneath.

If you have the ability to do dual extrusion, this could be a great trick to have in your toolbox. Granted, PVA will still be of interest if you have support buried deep inside some structure where it is physically difficult to get to. Water can go where tweezers can’t. But for supporting large accessible areas, this looks like a game-changer.

Sometimes automatic supports can use a little help. There are plenty of supports and best practices for supports if you want to fine-tune your process.

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Holograms: The Future Of Speedy Nanoscale 3D Printing?

April 9, 2023 by Dave Rowntree 7 Comments

3D printing by painting with light beams on a vat of liquid plastic was once the stuff of science fiction, but now is very much science-fact. More than that, it’s consumer-level technology that we’re almost at the point of being blasé about. Scientists and engineers the world over have been quietly beavering away in their labs on the new hotness, nanoscale 3D printing with varying success. Recently IEESpectrum reports some promising work using holographic imaging to generate nanoscale structures at record speed.

Current stereolithography printers make use of UV laser scanned over the bottom of a vat of UV-sensitive liquid photopolymer resin, which is chemically tweaked to make it sensitive to the UV frequency photons. This is all fine, but as we know, this method is slow and can be of limited resolution, and has been largely superseded by LCD technology. Recent research has focussed on two-photon lithography, which uses a resin that is largely transparent to the wavelength of light concerned, but critically, can be polymerized with enough energy density (i.e. the method requires multiple photons to be simultaneously absorbed.) This is achieved by using pulsed-mode lasers to focus to a very tight point, giving the required huge energy density. This tight focus, plus the ability to pass the beam through the vat of liquid allows much tighter image resolution. But it is slow, painfully slow.

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Fast Scanning Bed Leveling

April 6, 2023 by Al Williams 29 Comments

The bane of 3D printing is what people commonly call bed leveling. The name is a bit of a misnomer since you aren’t actually getting the bed level but making the bed and the print head parallel. Many modern printers probe the bed at different points using their own nozzle, a contact probe, or a non-contact probe and develop a model of where the bed is at various points. It then moves the head up and down to maintain a constant distance between the head and the bed, so you don’t have to fix any irregularities. [YGK3D] shows off the Beacon surface scanner, which is technically a non-contact probe, to do this, but it is very different from the normal inductive or capacitive probes, as you can see in the video below. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to see it print because [YGK3D] mounted it too low to get the nozzle down on the bed. However, it did scan the bed, and you can learn a lot about how the device works in the video. If you want to see one actually printing, watch the second, very purple video from [Dre Duvenage].

Generally, the issues with probes are making them repeatable, able to sense the bed, and the speed of probing all the points on the bed. If your bed is relatively flat, you might get away with probing only 3 points so you can understand how the bed is tilted. That won’t help you if your bed has bumps and valleys or even just twists in it. So most people will probe a grid of points.

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