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??

A Quick Update

Things have been happening but I've been short on time to take pictures. Since I was waiting on pictures to do a full blog entry you get a quick update with teasers for what's in store.

I have a pretty good way to print miniatures on my 3D printers so I've got a variety of those to show off.

I've been working on modifying the base for a 3D printed dragon to hold a set of dice, making it a dice dragon. That's CAD work and I'm not great at it but I'm getting better.

I've been finishing more Printable Scenery buildings for my friend so pictures of those will be forthcoming as well.

My printers will be undergoing a significant upgrade and I hope to take pictures of the process. At least I'll have a before and after set. It should be a sweet set of upgrades.

I have some tutorials for Octoprint, which is the software that's on my print servers. They're detailed and I have some preliminary ones I want to get done before the meaty ones.

I've been working very long days which makes me too worn out to do a lot of things in the evenings. That's not an excuse. It's telling you why the blog has been neglected recently. My housework has been just as neglected. I'm fixing some of that tonight since my kitchen had been overrun and I couldn't stand it any more. That and I wanted clean dishes.

So that's what's in store for the near future. Leave me a comment if there's something you want me to write about since you're the ones reading this.

The Printers are Idle

What? The printers aren't printing? What's wrong? WHAT'S WRONG?

Actually there is something wrong with both of them. It's a minor thing but something I want to fix properly before getting them up and running again.

This guy put one printer on idle:

See that part sticking out in front, on the top? Yeah. That guy. For whatever reason it caught on some wires you can't see on the other side of the print head. Those are some thin wires that really should be protected better. In and of itself that wasn't the problem. When it caught on those wires it made the print head hang when it goes side to side. When it freed itself it was in the wrong place but didn't know it. It continued to print but the layers were now about an inch to the right.

That's called 'layer shift' for very obvious reasons. And that ruined a print that had been running for over twenty four hours. I'm still going to send it to my friend because he's crafty enough he can use it to make something else.

The other printer has been having trouble with that same component but for different reasons. I've been able to print decently even though it's a problem. But since I don't have anything pressing to print I decided to idle them both and fix the darn thing once and for all.

My solution is going to be to tape those wire to the much larger ones running along side them. That serves a dual purpose of keeping them safe and keeping them out of the way. Which I guess is the same purpose really. But I'll call it two reasons.

Here's the next question. What do you use to tape something when it's right up against a block of metal being heated up to about 220 degrees Celsius? For those of us using imperial measure that's over 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Regular old electrical tape isn't going to do it here.

There's a special tape meant for high temperature use. There's a piece of it holding the heater in place under the print bed. Of course I don't have any on hand so an Amazon order was placed. In case you want to know this is kapton tape and it's used in a lot of places where high temperatures are around. It's good to have some on hand anyway. At least if you have a 3D printer it's good to have on hand.

When it arrives I'll test that the parts are working properly (heat it up, wiggle the wires, watch the temperature) and replace what is bad. Then I'll carefully align the sets of wires and spiral wrap tape them together until they pass the problem area. After that they go into the main cable bundle that's in a textile sleeve.

Until then the printers are sitting here. I unloaded the filaments so they're truly idle and kind of sad to see.

I'll have them running for a couple of months and then my next upgrades happen. Those are going to be a doozy. I'm upgrading the entire frame to extruded aluminum and there's an upgrade from the manufacturer as well. All new plastic parts will be printed. At the same time I'll do the routine maintenance I've put off. These things are literally going to be stripped down to parts and rebuilt in the process.

And I'll be spinning that design around so the sticking out bit is around back and less of a hazard for the wires when I print it again.

OK - Something I Printed

I've been rather less than generous with pictures of the 3D printed stuff, which is a rip since the idea is to see what I've been doing. Right?

Here's something I printed for a friend. He bought into their Kickstarter and then started sending me files and lists of what he wanted. I picked this one as the first print because it was going to take the longest.

I painted the miniature that's on there for a sense of scale. He's on a one inch square base.

This was four separate prints - first floor, second floor, roof, and doors. The total print time was 156 hours and it took over a kilo (one spool) of filament hence the purple snow on the roof.

Yes. You read that right. 156 hours to print this. That's what 3D printing is about. It's about waiting. The layers on this were 0.2mm each so it took five passes to make 1mm of print. I'll let you try to do the math on how many layers there were.

Here's the link to the file so you can see their painted pictures and the detail inside. It's pretty intense on the first floor.

https://www.printablescenery.com/product/library-of-ithillia/

I used up that orange-ish filament I'd had sitting around for a while and now I'm working on the purple. Due to getting a monthly subscription box I end up with spools of filament in colors I wouldn't have chosen for myself. Sometimes this is good, sometimes it isn't. He's getting prints out of the colors I don't like.

It's all right! He's going to paint it and I confirmed that he was fine with odd color prints. The printer makes it easy to change filament so that's a plus. I haven't enabled the sensor to pause the printer when it runs out of filament because I've heard about too many failures both ways - false positives and not working as it's supposed to work. I time the prints so I can be around when the filament will run out and I can swap in the next roll.

I posted this picture on Facebook - in some 3D printing for tabletop/gaming groups, in the printer group, and on my own page. I wanted to show it off. The sheer size of it is impressive. I take no credit for the design but it's a darn good print.

If that's all you want to know then you can stop here. I'm going to proceed with everything that's wrong with it and why. No. I don't and won't have pictures of that.

1 - Stringing. Inside the smaller curves the plastic didn't adhere well enough and it pulled out into strings. It happened because of the way the print cooling fan directs air. I haven't found a replacement fan shroud that minimizes this and I may take a crack at designing one myself. But there's very little if anything I can do in the print settings to help this one.

2 - Drooping. This is the opposite of what happens when the print gets cool too fast. When it doesn't cool fast enough the plastic can sag away from the previous layer. So you get little loops of filament. This happened on the sides where the print fan can't get an adequate amount of air in time. Again it comes down to something I can't change.

These problems happened due to the way the print fan shroud directs air and the size of the print. I couldn't move it around so that it was minimized or eliminated. I feel bad with the amount of cleanup he's doing to have to do but a lot of it isn't immediately visible or is in parts (like the inside of the roof) where it doesn't matter as much.

It's not perfect but it's darn pretty.