Organized Memories

I've got a lot of Hirst Arts molds. I've had them for quite a while. Since making the modular dungeon back in 2010 I haven't done much of anything with them. I'm in the process of cleaning and organizing the hobby stuff - a never-ending process by the way - I decided to finally put them away properly.

These are photo storage containers from Michaels but work excellently for storing molds. Most molds. Some are a bit tight in there but not enough to worry me. They have squish points. Luckily I had exactly the right number of containers for my molds. I didn't count them first. Typical of me, I know.

It took me some time since I wanted to do it once, do it right. That meant pulling up my old page which had all my molds so I knew which ones were there and then correlating them back to the Hirst Arts store to get their names. My page only had their numbers since that's what is on the images I took.

But first they needed to have the excess plaster scraped off (I probably should have washed them thoroughly but they're lucky they got this much attention) and then powder them. The powder is just one of those extra steps that is more of a precaution than a necessity. It's on the site to do it, I was going to do it.

Then it was a matter of going out on the patio and working slowly through each mold. Finding the next numeric one, cleaning it off, dusting it, making the label, putting it away. Mold by mold.

To make it more interesting I have a number of molds that are no longer in production. I do have a printout of them so those were easy enough to sort out. I also have some third party molds that I pretty much guessed the names at.

Two of my molds are on loan. I know who and when. I left open spots for them where they'll go when they're returned.

And I seem to be missing one mold. I'll have a better look at where they were since it's a thinner one but if I can't find it I'll put out a message to the old group to see if anyone borrowed it and didn't return it. I'm not very fond of it but it was on my list so I might as well see about getting it back if I can.

For a bit of eye candy here's the modular dungeon set up for a convention game.

Several of the fancy floors are A&K molds that aren't on the market any more. They were fun to paint if slightly too small to fit in with the Hirst ones properly. The rest of the fancy floors are painted by me to be fancy. Mostly.

Some Days...

Honestly some days I feel like I'm too stupid to 3D print.

I'm currently printing some upgrade parts for my printer. One of my printers. If I like it I'll print them for the other printer. They'll also work on the upgrades (hopefully) so they're not a waste of time and filament.

Since these parts are near where the molten plastic comes out they need to be a type that withstands high temperatures. You really should use one that's got a higher melting point than what you print with most of the time. That's common sense. People try to fudge it and pretty much always end up with sagging parts. That's not good.

So I pulled out the barely used roll of this stuff and started.

A quick run of the numbers. Skip this if numbers aren't your thing. Even worse they're in metric but I'll be nice and put the conversions in here too. 3D printers are pretty much all metric which is just fine for most of the world.

PLA - My main go-to plastic. Nozzle temp 220C (430F), bed temp 60C (140F).
PET-G - More flexible than PLA and handles higher temps better. Nozzle temp 240C (465F), bed temp 80C (175F).
ABS - The common high-temp plastic. Nozzle temp 255C (490F), bed temp 100C (212F).

The piece that wraps around the nozzle and blows air on the parts to cool them has to be printed out of at least ABS if not one with a higher nozzle temperature. Looking at the numbers you can see why. ABS has it's issues - it stinks, it doesn't like ANY kind of draft, and it prints hot. Literally you can boil water on the print bed when using this stuff. But sometimes it's what you use.

Fun fact. PLA will warp in a hot car. PET-G won't. Many is the person who has found out the hard way about leaving PLA pieces in their cars.

Anyway.

There's a glitch in the standard profile for ABS that ups the bed temperature to 110C after the first layer. It's not a glitch so much as a way to try keep the darn stuff from warping. However for some reason as soon as my printer bed goes over 100C it gets cranky the safety measures say it's too hot and shuts down the print. Sigh. And those are the temps that are in the vendor provided profiles.

It's common for bed temperatures to change after the first layer. Typically they drop by 5C but in this case it went up. Oh well.

I updated the profiles not to bump the bed temperature and went on my merry printing way. Except that it turns out I didn't redo all my files that I had created using the old profile.

This morning I was printing a small piece to check that it was getting smooshed onto the print bed enough without getting too smooshed. Fractions of millimeters count here. If it's too smooshed it leaves a ridge called an elephant's foot. Not only does it look bad it has an impact when you're doing things like printing parts for your printer. If it's not smooshed enough your bottom layers can look bad and the print can come loose from the print bed. So you dial that one in.

I forgot to redo that test piece with the change to the bed temperature. Bzzt. Print shuts down.

Grumble, grumble, mutter, mutter. Redo the part and copy it to the print server. Fine.

From what did get printed I decided what was in place would work. I knew this piece was done right since I did it this morning. What the heck. I have lots of this stuff and if they have a ridge I can fix it and print another set, right?

What I did was choose something with a very similar name but created for PLA. Obviously it isn't going to print well at all if you're using the wrong temperatures. Sigh. Luckily I caught it early since I was watching to make sure the temperature didn't bump up and wondered why the bed temperature was so low. Then I looked at the file name - they have the type of plastic in them.

Sigh.

Cleaned it up. Decided to print the test piece since I was starting over. Very slight elephant's foot so I'll be playing with that to get it better.

It will all work out but so many mistakes right at the beginning of my day makes me tired. You can only adjust the first layer height while it's printing the first layer (of course) so that's time sensitive and easy to miss on a small piece. But it's fine if you catch it at the right time.

These are my test pieces. They're meant to make sure that you're extruding the right amount of plastic. If they fit together nicely then you're fine. If they're loose you're not extruding enough. If they don't fit you're extruding too much. There's a modifier in the software that makes the files where you can adjust that. The green ones are PET-G and the color of all the parts for my upgraded printer. The black ones are ABS and the color for the fan shroud.

And another piece of eye candy is a good first layer. That's actually called "First Layer Pron" but spelled correctly (I changed it here to make sure any filters wouldn't catch it and consider this an adult content blog). Seeing a good first layer is always a wonderful thing, if you're a 3D printer.

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.

Miniature Storage

Bwahahhaa! I have deboned the bag of t-shirts a friend gave me!

Wait - no calling the local PD for a wellness check on me. Hear me out.

A friend was moving and per my request gave me a bag full of old cotton t-shirts he wasn't going to wear any more and/or didn't want to move. I have a use for those kinds of shirts.

But before I get into that here's the end result.

Shirt carcasses on the left, shirt bones on the right.

Seriously. No wellness check.

What I did was cut out all the seams and hems from the shirts. That leaves me large amounts of plain t-shirt fabric, if you use the side that doesn't have a design on it. Why would I need large amounts of plain t-shirt fabric?

This! This is why!

Those are foam transport trays for miniatures. The vast majority of minis I paint are army miniatures and don't go on display. I store them in the transport trays so if I ever get the chance to play I can grab the necessary trays, put them in a transport case, and off I go. Yes. I will label the edges of the trays so I know what's in them.

These things are great but almost everyone forgets something. The foam is a mild abrasive. The sticky-out bits of minis can and do get the paint worn off them from being moved around in transport trays. Sad but true. The very thing that's supposed to protect them is doing them harm....

Still no wellness check needed.

What I do is use pieces of the t-shirt fabric to protect the minis. It's more work when taking them out of the trays and putting them back but in the long run it means far less work repairing the paint jobs on them. When you have seventeen armies that can add up.

If you're going to do this yourself make sure you're using 100% cotton shirts. Polyester may feel soft but it's not. Go for the cotton.

The well washed ones work best because they're nice and soft. That's why we always keep them around far past their lifespan. Here's a use for them that will keep them in the game, as it were.

For those who aren't as familiar with deboning t-shirts here's how I do it. All cuts are done next to seams so I won't put that in the instructions.

1. Cut one sleeve up to the shoulder
2. Cut the sleeve off the shirt completely
3. Cut the seam off the sleeve
4. Cut the hem off the sleeve
5. Repeat on any remaining sleeves (there should only be one more but I don't judge)
6. Cut from the shoulder seam to the neck
7. Cut around the neck to the other shoulder seam
8. Cut down the shoulder seam to the remaining sleeve seam
9. Cut around the sleeve seam back to the shoulder seam
10. Cut around the neck back to the original shoulder seam
11. Cut around the sleeve seam
12. Cut the hem off the shirt body

Here's the fun bit. At least I consider it fun because it's a bit of a challenge and if you have a lot of shirts to cut up you can get into the routine.

Steps 1 through 5 can be done and leave one bone for each sleeve.
Steps 6 through 11 can be done to leave one bone from the body.
Step 12 will always be a separate one since there's no seams from top to bottom.

You don't have to try to keep them as single pieces. That's my thing. As long as you get rid of ALL the seams you'll have nothing but nice, smooth, soft fabric to swaddle your troops.

Even if you don't have a lot of minis or fancy transport trays this is a way to safely store your special minis. Wrap them up and put them in a plastic shoebox. The shirt fabric will pad them and keep them from rubbing on each other and as long as you don't jam too many in there it will also keep swords unbent.

Yes. It works for transporting a single mini to a game as well. Drop it in a sandwich bag and you're golden.

Remember - 100% cotton is the way to go!

Printing Malaise and Opening Access to the Printers

I've been doing a LOT of 3D printing lately. I had a project for a convention that I didn't do and I've got a lot to print for a friend of mine. I got a little burnt out on the printing thing for a while.

This weekend I finally got the cameras set up for the interim. The whole thing is going to change some time after April when I do upgrades that will take me into the custom modification area. That includes new camera mounts. I'm fine with it and I'm looking forward to it. So for now these will work, at least for monitoring. I can use the timelapse videos to practice my editing and make my images to bracket the videos so they're not so abrupt to start and end.

I also need to put my own watermark on them instead of the printer server logo. But that's a small thing.

One thing I did do was remove a server plugin that would have made for 'better' timelapse videos but at the expense of my prints. The general concept is that this moves the print bed and print head to fixed spots before it takes the picture so the final result is a static image. It's pretty cool. I was looking forward to using it.

Then when I got into setting it up there was a big glaring thing I didn't like. It keeps track of exactly where the printer is - X, Y, and Z. That's fine. But what it doesn't like is when you have different kinds of movement at the same speed. It wants all of them to be different. And then you have to change your settings for creating your files to match. That was the deal killer.

I spend a lot of time getting those settings as close to perfect as I can. The end result is the print. Now a plugin that does nothing but take pictures wants me to adjust my print settings. The settings I've spent hours refining. It might not seem like much to change something by 0.1mm but it is.

For one thing that means everything I've already gotten prepped will have to be redone. That's simple for most of them and difficult for others that I've done work on to print exactly as I want. It's also forcing me to change my printer settings to match this plugin - that's not guaranteed to work, mind you - just so it can take pictures.

I uninstalled the plugin from both servers. I'm going to see if there's really an issue with having the print head moving all over during a timelapse. I'm not nearly the only one who does them this way.

Two things to finish up here.

One - I do plan on uploading these to my YouTube channel and I'll get you the name of it once I have everything settled out there.

Two - If you want to be able to check in on the printers whenever you like and be notified when new prints start, etc. then you can do that through Telegram. Install it, create an account, and send a message to each of the bots associated with my printers.

Note - The request won't go through if the printer is running so if you send a message and there's no response in a reasonable amount of time you may have to send it again. I won't know if you sent it and it bounced.

The Telegram bots are:

@Rastl_bot
@RastlWorld_Other_Bot

Two printers, two bots.

Once you're set up you'll get notifications at times and you can request status updates. These come with pictures. I may ask you if you want notifications at certain points in the print but don't enable those by default.

Fun thing. Telegram commands include /shutup and /dontshutup to turn notifications off and on. So if you sign up for them but they're bothering you for the day you can turn them off. Or send me a Telegram message to remove them completely.

Kapton Tape Sucks

That was an attention-getting title. I'm not above clickbait.

Kapton tape is really kapton film with adhesive. This stuff is thin. Because it's thin it likes to twist, ball up, not go where you want it, and generally be a pain in any sensitive part of your anatomy you want to name.

I got the wires taped up. Moderate profanity was used. One large problem was that I was doing this without disassembling the extruder. Had I taken it apart it would have been much easier. But I went the lazy way.

I'm not sure that the part is good on one of the printers. It's still doing some temperature fluctuations but that's also happening when there's some really odd airflow patterns from the part fan.

OK. Let me explain that one.

There's two fans on the extruder - the hot end fan and the part fan. They both do what the names say - the cool different parts of the process. The hot end fan isn't nearly as powerful as the part fan and keeps things constant for the heater. The part fan is a tricky beast since it's trying to cool the molten plastic without cooling it too much. There's a shroud that fits the end of the fan and tries its best to direct the air where it should go.

When I had the shelf accident I think that the part fan on one printer took enough of a hit that the bearings went wonky. It certainly rattles when it's running. 

The extruder fan is on the left. There's a hole in the extruder body to let the air in.

The part fan is on the right. The R3 upgrade put it at that angle. There's discussion whether the angle of the fan causes extra stress on the fan bearings or not.

The wires that I taped are those red ones. The tape is orange. The red wires are the nice, thick heater wires. The thermistor wires (the tiny ones) aren't seen here. But they're blue. And tiny.

I'm not replacing the fan yet for these reasons.

1. It seems to be working;
2. There's an upgrade planned in the near-ish future;
3. Replacing it is a pain in the sensitive part of the anatomy (at the moment at least).

The reason replacing it is a pain is 85% the part itself and 15% me. After I do what I should have done when I last upgraded it then the split will be 95%/5%. Here's the problem. The fan is a generic notebook fan. Which is great, they're easy enough to find. But the wires are far too short for use in the printer. So that's on us.

Some people solder them. This is actually a replacement fan and I went the lazy way (go figure) of unsoldering the wires from the old fan and soldering them directly to the new fan. A little bit of futzy work but it's been fine. Going forward I was thinking I would solder them in the wire run instead.

The second printer is different. The previous owner put a connector on the wires. That way when you replace the fan you put a connector on the new fan and it's easy enough to replace it. Brilliant! I even got those same connectors. That way I would have both in the same configuration.

I didn't put the connector on when the printer was nicely in pieces. I was going to do it but went "Eh" and didn't. Now I'm paying the price for it. If I could replace it that easily I would do so. I have plenty of spares. It's more of a chore to do it now when the wires are bundled up.

Enough technical talk!

I did do some printing but that large print that failed kind of burned me out for a bit. That's another reason the printers are idle. I needed a break. I really enjoy printing but it was wearing on me to have them going all the time. I did do a test print on each one and that's how I know what's going on with the thermistors. But for now I'm letting them be idle.

On a better note I have the temporary camera stands printed and assembled. The next/last step is connecting them to the print servers and setting them up for monitoring and time lapse videos. Of course there's more steps than that but it's the general idea.

There's ALWAYS something to do when you have one of these things. Image it with two...

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.