Thursday, July 25, 2019

So You Want to Buy a 3D Printer?

Really? You think you're ready to jump into the wild and wonderful world of 3D printing?

This is where the GM asks "Are you sure?"

Because here's what I've been dealing with on one of my printers. They're the same brand, same version, same pretty much everything. I say 'pretty much' because there are some differences.

A little while ago I had one of the print head fans die on me. No big deal. I had a replacement on hand. Take the old one off, unwrap the cable harness, swap the cables, put the new fan on. It's not that difficult. However...

The fan model I got was the one recommended at the time. If you're interested it's a Noctua. And it even comes with a handy adapter pack! Of course none of the adapters fit my printer. No matter. I have a soldering iron. Clip, solder, heatshrink tube. I'm ready to go!

Fan goes on fine and tests fine.

Then I start getting clogging on various filaments at various times. The same filaments work fine on the other printer. I was annoyed and frustrated. There was a clog serious enough I had to take the print head apart and drill out some of the filament. More on that spool later.

I put it all back together and it's still being inconsistent. Which means I'm down a printer.

I wonder what the previous owner did to this and if the heat transfer isn't quite right. Clogging can be caused by that. So I take the hot end apart AGAIN and put fresh thermal paste on one piece, carefully putting it all back together.

Then it hits me. There had been posts about the Noctua fans but I couldn't remember them. A little searching in one of the Facebook groups and asking the guys in the moderator chat tells me that the Noctua fan doesn't push enough air, causing things like clogs. Sigh.

Luckily I had bought new fans for the pending upgrade, including one as a spare. This isn't quite as involved since it's a fan swap (again). Off with the Noctua, on with the Sunon. At least this one is a pretty black instead of the weird tan and flesh color of the other one.

Since I had the print head disassembled I have to calibrate it again. The full deal, not just the minor one. This includes setting the nozzle height from the base bed manually (you literally use a flashlight to see the space between the nozzle and the print bed) then adjusting the induction probe to a certain height. Only then can you run the software to calibrate. Three tries later (changing NOTHING, btw) I get it to pass calibration. But I'm not done yet..

It still needs to be fine tuned to the print bed. In our world that's called a Live Z since you can adjust the height of the first layer while it's printing. Live. On the Z axis. Pretty cool, right?

Ok. Fine. I have a little file to do this. I load up the printer and the new fan is spinning away. Yay. But the print is coming out in these little dots. Sigh. Nozzle clog. Unload the filament and get out the cleaning filament. That's just nylon, really, but it prints hotter so up the temperature and load the cleaning filament.

This is the point where it would hesitate then start extruding a nice thick line of cleaning filament. Nope. Not this time. There's more of a clog. So a cold pull it is. Set the temperature to where the filament will be solid then wait. Once it's cooled down pull the filament back out, hopefully capturing any stray bits that were hanging around.

Why didn't any of this show up when I had it in pieces? I didn't do a cold pull because I honestly didn't think I had a clog of this nature. They're not that common. The new fan doesn't do squat when there's a solid piece of something physically blocking the 0.40mm opening of the nozzle.

The first cold pull showed a chunk of the last filament I tried to print was hanging around in there. So back up goes the temperature and another cleaning filament load. Nope. Still clogged. Time for a second cold pull so down goes the temperature. The cleaning filament isn't showing anything obvious but it's also not the pretty point I want showing a clear nozzle.

Back up goes the temperature for another cold pull. This time I'll manually feed the cleaning filament until I can see it coming out the nozzle then drop the temperature to pull it back out. A lot of this time is spent waiting for the nozzle temperature to get to where I want it.

While I'm waiting I'll remind you of the temperatures. The printers are in metric so the temperatures are in Celsius. My normal printing temperature is 220C (428F). The cleaning filament works best at 265C (509F). The 'drop' is to 180C (365F). It's easy to forget just how hot these run until you do the math or do something stupid like grab plastic that came right out of the nozzle.

Third run with the cleaning filament. Back up goes the temperature. I'm going to let the print head feed it this time and see what happens. And it's still clogged. Back down goes the temperature. This one also shows as inconclusive. I'm not seeing anything in there but I'm also not seeing the right shape to the end of the filament.

I'm done for the night. I can only do so much before it gets too frustrating to continue. Other people may have more patience but after a long day at work and then putting the printer back together I can only do so much troubleshooting.

Tomorrow I'll work more on figuring out what's going on with the filament not feeding and make a new post about what's going on.

The other printer is chugging along nicely, printing Star Wars: Legion terrain for someone.

What does this have to do with a desire to buy a 3D printer? I'm detailing this to give you an idea of some of the things you WILL have to do at some point. These things are great, until you have to break out the tools to figure out what's not working right. If you're not a patient person and you don't like to tinker with things then you're not going to enjoy your printer.

Sunday, July 14, 2019

Nothing Interesting, Sadly - But with Pictures!

On the 3D printing front I'm currently churning through prints for other people. It's nice to have things to do and I enjoy printing for them. But it takes the printers out of commission for my own stuff. Of course that's when I find things I really want to print for myself but forget again when the printers are open.

Life.

I just finished a bunch of Gaslands terrain for someone. And car parts. That's when I found out that Inland's 'consistent color' isn't really that great. The grey went from light grey to medium/dark. Luckily it didn't matter in the print I was doing but I'm going to have to take both filament cats to the store and find out what is the grey going forward. Or stock up on both colors. I'm not sure yet.


These are both just called 'Grey' on the label. I think they're different colors. And yes. That's a grey hair of mine on the darker one. It got stuck under the label I put on each cat. It has been removed from the cat with extreme prejudice. It was nicely appropriate to the topic so I'll give myself points for it.

Another thing I'm printing is a lot of Star Wars: Legions terrain. I got done with Tatoine and now I'm on to Imperial. I hope to get some pictures once he's painted them because they look better that way. But it's been some long prints and I'm just starting up the Imperial. Luckily I have a spool of grey from a company that's gone out of business so I can use it up on this stuff. I should use up most of the spool if not all of it. The dark grey above matches close enough that it shouldn't matter if I have to swap it in.

I lied. Here's some of the Tatoine stuff. The light brown seemed appropriate to the setting and I printed them in thicker layers so they'll have a nice texture when he paints them.





I have a lot of printing left to go for another friend who bought into a Printable Scenery Kickstarter for elven terrain with the intention of me printing them. Literally this has been hours of printing. Hundreds of hours and spools of filament. He doesn't care what color they are so I've been using up more of those discontinued colors and am quite happy about it.

I don't think I ever shared any of those prints so here's a couple of them. If I have shared them you get to see them again.




Just to give you an idea that large one (it's a library) took 156 hours to print the four pieces. And those minis are on one inch bases. So there's a lot of time invested in his printing and he keeps sending more files my way. I hope some day to be caught up so I can mail it off to him.

Other than those there's been a couple of small print jobs for friends and those are nice to have done. I've also printed up some Tardis boxes that I'll sell as dice containers (yes, I checked the license and I can sell them) which used up all but some of the discontinued WhoBlue color. I need the rest of it for a game organizer container. Whatever is left is going to be Tardis LED earrings. It was meant for Tardis stuff, might as well use it that way.

I think that covers the 3D printing.

I haven't made much (any) progress in clearing off my workspace. I know I need to do it and I keep meaning to do it. But life happens then suddenly it's close to when I need to start winding down to go to sleep which means no working on organizing. It's maddening and worse because I'm doing it to myself.

Add onto that going to two conventions in the next month and my time is limited. I'll go to one, have a couple of weeks, then go to the other. The second one has planned very poorly for scheduling their convention. They used to have it in May, then October. Both weren't bad. Then they switched to Labor Day weekend. Which is bad. The timing is actually bad because of the huge convention just a couple of weeks ahead of it, being the same weekend as a huge convention, and over a holiday weekend. But I don't work there so I just show up and do my thing.

Last thing! I have a hoard of GM accessories. A literal hoard. I love those things and I'm a sucker for them. The item generators folder on my hard drive is packed full of files and I have other things as well. Just recently I got some dice (yay dice!) for when you need to add some detail to rooms on the fly. Of course I like to add more detail so I got three of each set.




I need to find a better way to store them. The little boxes are great until you pick one up wrong and have dice all over the floor. I'll probably end up designing and printing something to hold them. Or just toss them all in a random dice bag. It's not like I don't have plenty of those sitting around.

Each color is a different theme. I'd have to look up what they are and I will be making a reference card for myself since I know there's no way I'm going to remember it. But aren't they fun??