So, I finally printed part 2 for my stool! I’ll spare you the pictures since it looks pretty similar to the last one, but it is coming along! Once I get all the parts printed, I am planning on binding them together with Acrylic cement, specifically this stuff! For binding PLA, it’s absolutely the strongest stuff around since it seems to melt the surfaces together and fuse them. It also works nicely as an all around surface finishing technique, the same way acetone does for ABS!
So that’s already all there is to say about the stool for now, but I have been working on another side project (just so I can have a little more blog content!!). I am not a huge fan of the way Slic3r generates supports, so I have undertaken the project of trying to get my Hyrel working with Cura (a different G-code generating tool) instead of Slic3r (just to see what will happen!). The main building block that
I found a really nice tool online actually that lets you create custom machine profiles for Cura: https://quillford.github.io/CuraProfileMaker/. This site gives you a machine profile for any 3d printer so you can put it into Cura. So, I created myself a profile, imported it into Cura, programmed in my best guess for PLA settings, and gave it a whirl on 3d benchy: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:763622 I had a few interesting things happen with the benchy, but I will show you the picture of what printed before I killed it:
So, now we can visualize what’s wrong with this… first for the good:
1.) The infill looks very clean! it seems to have printed very well.
2.) Something actually printed haha…. wasn’t sure what was going to happen!
Now for the things that need fixing (longer list haha):
1.) The perimeters were a little thin, and looked very globby instead of the nice, smooth line you come to expect from 3d printing. And this was even with the pulses per nanoliter and feedrate cranked up on my Hyrel. So, I adjusted the flow rate in Cura to 120% instead of the 100% it was at before so it extrudes a little more filament as it travels.
2.) The head movements were very fast and jerky. I might reduce the speeds a little bit in Cura, or I might see if adjusting other settings improves the print quality enough where it doesn’t matter! That still remains to be seen and needs some experimenting.
3.) When the print started out, it wasn’t in the center of the platform like I had placed it in Cura. To get the picture you see in this post, I manually changed the Gcode so it started at the center of the platform. I think this was due to me checking the “Machine Center is Zero” option on the Cura Profile Maker. So, I reconfigured the hyrel profile and will try slicing benchy again to see if it makes a difference.
All in all, the results are beginning to look promising! Just a little bit of tweaking, and I should eventually have it to the point where Cura-generated Gcode will run on my Hyrel printer!
John (aka The Mad Printer)
The Mad Printer 