TPU

12 Articles

This Is The Future Of Waste Management

December 4, 2022 by 13 Comments

Many of us have been asking for some time now “where are our robot servants?” We were promised this dream life of leisure and luxury, but we’re still waiting. Modern life is a very wasteful one, with items delivered to our doors with the click of a mouse, but the disposal of the packaging is still a manual affair. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to summon a robot to take the rubbish to the recycling, ideally have it fetch a beer at the same time? [James Bruton] shares this dream, and with his extensive robotics skillset, came up with the perfect solution; behold the Binbot 9000. (Video, embedded below the break)

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DIY Self-Assembling 4D Printing

November 29, 2022 by 5 Comments

A 4D printed object is like a 3D printed object, but it changes shape or self-assembles when its environment changes. [Teaching Tech] has been reading about this technology and decided to try to replicate it using his conventional 3D printer.

His attempts to make a joint that changes when submerged in the water looked at several options: material that can absorb water, material that expands with temperature, and — the selected option — a dissolvable locking mechanism. Essentially, a hinge is held open by a water-soluble lock. When water dissolves the lock, the hinge can spring to its natural position.

Like most experiments, this one had a few false starts. But you always learn something each time. The final design had a TPU hinge and spring with PLA structural beams. The TPU required flat printing, so various pieces have to be rotatable so they can be placed in their final orientation after printing.

Usually, multi-material setups are for printing different colors of the same kind of plastic, it’s possible to use different plastics, but it can be tricky. As a compromise, [Teaching Tech] did one print using PLA and TPU, but printed the PVA locks in a separate pass and installed them on the print at the end. The first finished 4D print wasn’t entirely successful. The hot water slowly dissolved the PVA, but it also deformed the PLA. A redesign of the lock made a big difference.

We aren’t sure this is practical yet, but we are sure someone has a need for this technique and it could be made very practical with a little work. The last time we saw 4D printing, there were magnets involved. We think this is an exciting time where people aren’t just trying to get conventional printing to work well, but are pushing the envelope with new techniques like conical slicing, for example.

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Empty Spools Make Useful Tools, Like Counters

September 25, 2022 by 2 Comments

What’s the deal with getting things done? There’s a Seinfeld anecdote that boils down to this: get a calendar, do a thing, and make a big X on each day that you do the thing. Pretty soon, you’ll thirst for chains of Xs, then you’ll want to black out the month. It’s solid advice.

[3D Printy] likes streaks as well, and made several resolutions at the beginning of 2022. As the first of 30 videos to be made throughout the year, they featured this giant 3D printed counting mechanism (video, embedded below) that uses empty filament spools, some 3D prints, and not much else. These are all Hatchbox spools, and it won’t work for every type, but the design should scale up and down to fit other flavors.

This isn’t [3D Printy]’s first counter rodeo — he’s made several more normal-sized ones and perfected a clever carryover mechanism in the process, which is of course open-source. So each spool represents a single digit, and there are printed parts in the core that make the count carry over to the next spool. Whereas the early counters used threaded rod, this giant version rides on 2.5 mm smooth rod, so the spools can slide apart easily. But how does everything stay together? A giant elastic band made of TPU filament, of course — because the answer is always in the room.

Check out the video after the break, and stay for the 900%-sped-up assembly at the end.

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3D Printed Strain-Wave Gearbox Turns Up The Torque

September 17, 2022 by 6 Comments

3D printers are good for a lot of things, but making parts for power transmission doesn’t seem to be one of them. Oh sure, some light-duty gears and timing belt sprockets will work just fine when printed, but oftentimes squooshed plastic parts are just too compliant for serious power transmission use.

But that’s not a hard and fast rule. In fact, this 3D-printed strain-wave transmission relies on the flexibility of printed parts to work its torque amplification magic. In case you haven’t been briefed, strain-wave gearing uses a flexible externally toothed spline nested inside an internally toothed stationary gear. Inside the flexible spline is a wave generator, which is just a symmetrical cam that deforms the spline so that it engages with the outside gear. The result is a high ratio gear train that really beefs up the torque applied to the wave generator.

It took a couple of prototypes for [Brian Bocken] to dial in his version of the strain-wave drive. The PLA he used for the flexible spline worked, but wasn’t going to be good for the long haul. A second version using TPU proved better, but improvements to the motor mount were needed. The final version proved to pack a punch in the torque department, enough to move a car. Check it out in the video below.

Strain-wave gears have a lot of applications, especially in robotic arms and legs — very compact versions with the motor built right in would be great here. If you’re having trouble visualizing how they work, maybe a Lego version will clear things up.

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Tame Your Flexible Filaments With This Belt-Drive Extruder

May 25, 2022 by 8 Comments

[Proper Printing] clearly enjoys pushing the boundaries of 3D printed materials, and sometimes this requires building custom 3D printers or at least the business end of them. Flexible filaments can be a bit of a pain to deal with, simply because most extruders are designed to push the filament into the hot end with a simple hobbed bolt (or pinch roller setup) and only work reliably due the rigidity of the plastic itself. Once you go flexible, the rigidity is reduced and the filament often deflects sideways and the extruder jams. The longer the filament path leading to the hotend, the harder it gets.  The dual belt drive extruder (they’re calling it ‘proper extruder’) grips the filament on two sides with a pair of supported belts, guiding it into the hotend without allowing it to deflect sideways. The extruder body and gears were resin printed (but, we checked — the design is suitable for FDM printing as well) proving that resin printing on modern printers, does indeed maintain adequate dimensional accuracy allowing the building of mechanisms, despite the naysayers! Continue reading “Tame Your Flexible Filaments With This Belt-Drive Extruder” →

Gaskets, Can They Be 3D Printed?

April 20, 2022 by 72 Comments

Anyone who’s owned an older engine, whether it be in a car, motorcycle, or garden machine, will at some time have been faced with the need for a gasket. Even when the gasket is readily available there may be an imperative to fix the engine rather than wait for the part to arrive, so it’s common to make your own replacements. Simple ones are easy to cut from thin card, but if you’ve ever tried to do this with a really complex one you’ll know the pain of getting it right. This is the problem tackled in a video from [the_eddies], who has explored the manufacture of replacement gaskets by 3D printing.

The advantages of CAD and easy manufacture are obvious, but perhaps many common plastics might not perform well in hot or oily environments. For that reason he settles on TPU filament, and gives it a test in a bath of 2-stroke fuel mix to see how well it resists degradation. It passes, as it does also when used with a carburetor, though we’d be curious to see the results of a long-term test. We’ve placed the video below the break, so reach your own conclusions.

Gaskets have featured here before, and if you’re interested then there are other machines which can be used to make them.

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Printing Ceramics Made Easier

August 30, 2021 by 3 Comments

Creating things with ceramics is nothing new — people have done it for centuries. There are ways to 3D print ceramics, too. Well, you typically 3D print the wet ceramic and then fire it in a kiln. However, recent research is proposing a new way to produce 3D printed ceramics. The idea is to print using TPU which is infused with polysilazane, a preceramic polymer. Then the resulting print is fired to create the final ceramic product.

The process relies on a specific type of infill to create small channels inside the print to assist in the update of the polysilazane. The printer was a garden-variety Lulzbot TAZ 6 with ordinary 0.15mm and 0.25mm nozzles.

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