Saturday, Mar 31 2018
None of the changes I’ve made to the printer resolved the occasional gaps I was seeing in the extruded filament. After too many hours of test prints and watching to see what could be going on I finally noticed that sometime the filament spool would lurch a bit as the filament unwound. Hmmm, could that be related to the flow issue?
Spool rollers
I found a design on thingiverse called TUSH - The Ultimate Spool Holder that uses common 608 roller blade bearings. I just happend to have some bearings in the garage left over from a steel fidgit spinner I made for my grandson.
I printed the four sides of the spool holder then spent quite a bit of time filing and sanding the bosses that hold the bearing as they printed slightly larger than the 8 mm ID they needed to fit.
Test print
It was worth it. I printed this single wall test cube partially to test filament feed and partly to check my extruder calibration. The spots you see are dust – the camera catches things the eye doesn’t. There are zero gaps in the walls and the base. I could see the filament feed was very smooth as the part was printing. Bonus: it’s a lot easier to access the spool when it is time to change filament.
The walls measured .40 mm ± .01mm. I don’t know why the bosses printed at 8.3 mm. That is something else for me to look at.
Tuesday, Apr 3 2018
Printed last night
Mill table guards
I printed this last night. What are they? The second picture answers that question. They are guards for the table of my benchtop mill. They protect the surface from dropped tools and mostly keep chips out of the T-slots. I’d been using pieces of leather which were somewhat of a pain when it came time to brush off or vacuum up chips.
Printed in PLA.