Clear PLA Diffuses LEDs

February 20, 2023 by Al Williams 11 Comments

[Chuck] often prints up interesting 3D prints. But we enjoyed his enhancement to a cheap LED Christmas tree kit. The original kit was simply a few green PCBs in the shape of a tree. Cute, but not really something a non-nerd would appreciate. What [Chuck] did, though, is printed a clear PLA overcoat for it and it came out great. You can see how great in the video below.

You might think transparent PLA would be really clear, but because of the layers, it is more translucent than transparent. For an LED diffuser, though, it works great. There are a few things to consider when printing for this purpose. First, you’d think vase mode would be perfect for this, but he found out it didn’t work well — possibly due to something in the model, which was a download from Thingiverse.

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The Effect Of Filament Color On Print Strength And More

February 5, 2023 by Maya Posch 16 Comments

What is an FDM filament coloring’s purpose but to be an aesthetic choice? As it turns out, the additives that create these changes in coloring and transparency also affect the base properties of the polymer, whether it’s PLA, PETG, or another material. This is where a recent video by [CNC Kitchen] is rather illustrative, using a collection of colored PLA filaments from a single filament manufacturer.

[CNC Kitchen] ran a range of tests including tensile strength, ductility, layer adhesion, impact resistance, and annealing performance. The results showed no clear overall winner between plain PLA polymer and any specific color. Perhaps most fascinating was just how much these color additives change the material’s response to annealing. Baking the PLA at 100°C for 30 minutes generally improves material properties, but also can cause warping and shrinking. The effective warping and shrinking differed wildly between the filament.

The general conclusion would seem to be that the natural polymer isn’t necessarily the optimal choice, but that you should test and pick the filament from a specific manufacturer to fit your project’s needs.

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Digital Taxidermy Spool Recycling concept art.

Spool Tower: Empty Filament Spool Or Base For Miniature Civilizations

December 2, 2022 by Maya Posch 23 Comments

While churning through rolls of FDM filament, there are these empty spools that remain at the end. These can be thrown out with the trash, or be used as a standard base for miniatures, for use with Dungeons & Dragons tabletop gaming or similar, or just as a display piece. The latter is what the blokes over at Digital Taxidermy ran with when they started their first Spool Tower Kickstarter campaign. Now they’re back with Spool Tower 2: The Re-Spoolening.

These are STL bundle packs that should contain all that’s needed to turn an empty filament spool into an art piece, minus of course the painting. To get a free taste of what the experience is like, Digital Taxidermy provides a few free STLs, such as for the Ye Olde Taxidermee Shoppee and the Hab Block from the new crowdfunding campaign.

This effort raises the interesting question of what other standard (plastic) shapes of packaging could conceivably be used in a similar manner. After all, why print the whole thing when half the model could be made from something you’d otherwise just toss into the trash bin?

Thanks to [scat happens] for the tip.

Making Medical Simulators Less Expensive With 3D Printing And Silicone

November 8, 2022 by Navarre Bartz No comments

Medical training simulators are expensive, but important, pieces of equipment. [Decent Simulators] is designing simulators that can easily be replicated using Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) printers and silicone molds to bring the costs down.

Each iteration of the simulators is sent out for testing by paramedics and doctors around the world, and feedback is integrated into the next revision. Because the trainers are designed to be easily replicated, parts can easily be replaced or repaired which can be critical to keep personnel trained, especially in remote areas.

While not open source, some models are freely available on the [Decent Simulators] website like wound packing trainers or wound prostheses which could be great if you’re trying to get a head start on next year’s Halloween costumes. More complicated models will be on sale starting in January as either just the design files or a kit containing the files and the printed and/or silicone parts.

Interested in more medical hacks? Check out this Cyberpunk Prosthetic Eye or this Arduino Hearing Test Device.

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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Extruded Resin FDM Printing (With Lasers!)

June 22, 2022 by Adam Zeloof 22 Comments

At this point, 3D printers are nearly everywhere. Schools, hackerspaces, home workshops, you name it. Most of these machines are of the extruded-filament variety, better known as FDM or Fused Deposition Modelling. Over the last few years, cheap LCD printers have brought resin printing to many shops as well. LCD printers, like their DLP and SLA counterparts, use ultraviolet light to cure liquid resin. These machines are often praised for the super-high detail they can achieve, but are realllly slow. And messy — liquid resin gets everywhere and sticks to everything.

We’re not exactly sure what [Jón Schone] of Proper Printing was thinking when he set out to convert a classic printer to use resin instead of filament, but it had to be something along the lines of “Can you make FDM printing just as messy as LCD printing?”

It turns out you can. His extremely well-documented research is shown in the video below, and logs his design process, from initial idea to almost-kinda-working prototype. As you may expect, extruding a high-viscosity liquid at a controlled rate and laser-curing it is not an easy task, but [Jón] made a fantastic attempt. From designing and building his own peristaltic pump, to sending a UV laser through fiber-optic cables, he explored a ton of different approaches to making the printer work. While he may not have been 100% successful, the video is a great reminder that not all projects have to go the way we hope they will.

Even so, he’s optimistic, and said that he has a few ideas to refine the design, and welcomes any input from the community. This isn’t even the only new and interesting approach to resin printing we’ve seen in the last few weeks, so we share [Jón]’s optimism that the FDM Resin Printer will work (someday, at least).

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3D Print Finishing By Spraying Glazing Putty

May 10, 2022 by Dave Rowntree 19 Comments

Finishing off 3D prints is a labour-intensive process, and getting a good looking, smooth surface suitable for painting takes a lot of time and plenty of practice. Deeper printing layer lines or minor surface defects can be smoother over with a variety of materials, from putties to resins, but the deeper the defect, the thicker the filler and that takes it toll on the surface details – smoothing those out and making fine details less distinct. [Darkwing dad] has another solution that looks pretty easy to achieve, by mixing acetone with glazing putty it can be airbrushed over the print surface in one go. After a little experimentation with the ratio of putty to acetone, a wide open nozzle and a low pressure, it was found that a nice even spray could be achieved. Importantly it dries in just a few minutes, enabling multiple coats to be applied in a short space of time.

Once sufficient thickness has been applied, the coating can easily sanded to get a smooth result with the worst of the gaps filled, and the layer lines nicely hidden. The final part of the filling process is more typical, with a few coats of filler primer applied straight from a rattle can, followed by a light sand and you’re good for painting.

We’ve covered smoothing 3D prints practically as long as we’ve been covering 3D printing itself, and there are multiple ways to do this, depending on the filament material, your budget and you tolerance for noxious fumes. Here’s a guide for smoothing using UV curable resins, using a special smoothable filament with IPA, and finally if this is just too fancy, smelly or expensive, just whip out the old butane torch and smooth those prints with good old fashioned fire.

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