Herringbone gears make a difference...

Quick Update: Herringbone gears are 'the business'!  I fitted my newly printed herringbone gear set ( http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:10707) to my existing extruder and I saw an immediate improvement in print quality on a repeat print of the Dual Spiral Lightbulb. It was worth the effort. The basic difference the new gear set made was much improved control of retract/restart, which are frequent on this type of print. There was a quicker restart of flow as the print head moved position and less stringing for the very same gcode file!The...

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Quality review...

Recent disappointing efforts to print some smaller delicate objects, specifically the competition piece "Dual Spiral Lightbulb" left me thinking long and hard about where the quality issues lay in my printer. Was it software settings? Were there mechanical issues? Up until this point I had growing confidence that my printer was capable of 'good' quality prints, but the challenges posed by spindly objects, caused me to question that assumption. What...

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Voronoi D Tower attempt...

I gave a shot at this weeks forum competition , the Voronoi D Tower, but failed to complete a full print. Examples of some failed attempts in photo below.I'd keep getting to a height of about 30mm then the print would separate from the heated bed. It was frustrating and time consuming. The headed bed had been working excellently from original set-up a while back, with printed pieces of all heights sticking well to it, and then clicking...

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Headset cable repair

(Quick Post) The cable on my son's headset got a tug and broke recently. They would be his favourite headset, and the latest fashion, so the 'repair' challenge was taken up! I soldered the tiny wires together, but I needed to devise some kind of junction box for the new joints. Here's what I did...I drew out the little junction box is SketchUp, incorporating the headset logo. (I've duplicated and flipped it above just to show the logo, but you only...

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"Sappho's Head" competition submission...

I put an entry into the Weekly Print Competition taking place on the RepRap Forum. It was a great learning experience to enter something like this and brought the standard of my printing on immensely. The biggest challenge for me in printing this little object was to develop a good approach to cooling. Here's the final print I submitted, and some detail on the process.It only stands 54mm high in reality, and quite a challenge to print. The STL...

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