flubrush

I'm still trying to sort out my cleaning and curing process. Using the airbrush as a sort of pressure jet washer with IPA seems to do a good job with the smaller items I have been printing and seems to be a bit kinder to detail than dunking and brushing. I do have some reservations about my LED tank since I have read that UV LEDS can be a bit off the 405nm wavelength for the resin which could give poor curing. I've just ordered a 405nm LED lamp from Amazon to see if that improves matters - it won't arrive from China for another week or two. I've also had a look at ultrasonic cleaners but I'm a bit put off by adverse comments about the reliability of the less expensive ones and a bit reluctant to spend about the same amount as on my printer on the top end ones. :-) At the moment I'm slowly winning with Fusion 360 - mostly two steps forward one step back. :-) Jim.

Jason, I took the liberty of downloading your file and printing it on my Shuffle. I've been messing around with small parts and thought it would be a nice change to try something a bit bigger. I scaled it up to S scale and it just fitted on the build plate. This it straight out of the printer. I sliced it in ChiTuBox to 30 micron layers and accepted a default support placement from the software. I just raised it 5mm from the base and didn't try any orientation. It took about five hours to print. The weight of the complete print was 20gms. This is a view of one of the sides showing the layering on the side. The lighter layering looks to be about the pitch of the ballscrew. The single heavier layering mark seems to be co-incident with the inner horizontal beams and is only apparent in the centre of the side where the beams are - so maybe some interaction there. The lighter layering normally disappears with one coat of primer. After a quick coat of Halford's red primer and the layering is still just visible. ...and a kinder shot of the side showing pretty good quality which would need a minimum of work to finish off. I would re-visit the placing of supports on the outside if I wanted to do another one. You can see the remains of the supports on the nearest door which I hadn't cleaned off. At the moment I think I am having a post printing problem with curing. Even after about an hour in my UV LED tank yesterday and a hour on the window shelf this morning, the resin still feels a bit tacky and soft and I would normally feel a bit worried about spraying over it. I have to do a bit more investigation. Jim.

I first picked the idea up on the Facebook forums but I also noted that the instructions on the Phrozen resin bottle states "Clean with alcohol spray with airgun". I've got a cheap double action airbrush so I use it at 20psi and it seems to do the job very well. I find that it's easiest to do the work with the airbrush while the parts are still stuck to the plate - much easier to hold and keep the fingers out of the way of the spray. Then I get the parts off the plate and off the supports and at the moment I dunk them in a Kilner jar filled with IPA, just to be sure, and then retrieve them and use the air spray as a blow dry. I think the dunking is overkill and I'll probably miss that out in future. The Kilner jars came from the local superstore and are large enough to get my hand in easily and they have the clip top lids which open and close easily with a liquid and airtight seal. My UV curing is done in a white plastic bin from the same local superstore with the five metre strip of UV LEDs stuck round the inside. My bonus tip is take off the cover on the top of the resin tank before starting to print. :-)

Robin, I could calculate it by taking the area of the tank multiplied by 5mm. But it's quicker to say that I am about half way down my first 500g bottle having done a dozen or more prints in the last month or so. I ordered another 500g bottle before Christmas thinking that I might run out soon after Christmas, but I'm still on the first bottle. :-) Admittedly most of my prints are relatively small but unless you are doing large thick-walled prints (or even large solid ones) then your resin usage is quite low. The slicer program I use shows an estimate of the resin used. I've just done a test with a Fox coach bogie side in S scale and the program assesses that 3.5g of resin will be used. A lot of the larger files I have printed barely get more than a 10g assessment - and the low usage from my first 500g bottle of resin would support this. I think you have to re-visit the theory behind these resin printers. The printer lays down successive very thin layers upside down with the head rising by the layer height for each UV exposure - whether by laser or LED. It is possible that I could print a 200mm high object on my printer starting off with 5mm of resin in the tank if that quantity of resin was sufficient to print the whole piece. Having a reservoir of resin in the bottom of the resin tank is an efficient way of replenishing the resin required for the next layer to be exposed. It is a bit messy but not too bad once you get set up. You have to get rid of excess un-exposed resin at the end of the print or it will eventually set under available UV from daylight and affect the resolution and detail of your part. I started off by dunking parts in bottles containing IPA as in the video above, but I have now progressed onto using a cheap airbrush to spray IPA at the pieces to clean the excess resin out, then just spray air to dry off the IPA on the part. This has worked very well and is a good bit easier than dunking and brushing. An ultrasonic cleaner might be even better but I would probably still need the airbrush to blow off the IPA. Jim.

Robin, You definitely don't want to fill the resin tank since the plate assembly has to go down pretty well to the bottom of the tank for the early layers and that would displace quite a lot of resin out of a full resin tank. On my Phrozen, I put in about 5mm of resin to start and that seems to work well for a lot of the smaller items I am doing. I top the tank up to 5mm when I think it's beginning to look a bit low. I use the top of the plate as a measure - if the plate doesn't displace enough resin when doing the first layers to reach the back of the plate, then I will top up for the next print. I know that people doing large prints top up the tank during the print. Jim.

I've just got hold of a smaller Shuffle and I only emptied the resin tank once and cleaned it out - too much hassle. :-) I read on the Facebook groups that the resin could be left in the tank for weeks or even months, so I have been leaving the tank covered between prints and topping the resin up as required. The resin does settle in the tank after a day or two but I can mix it again just by taking the tank off and rolling it around for a minute or two. You can see if the resin has separated and I keep rolling until it looks mixed again. I haven't used as much resin as you lot - I have to get my brain around Fusion 360 to get more files generated. :-) But I've got some springs and axleboxes done and I'm working on a Fox bogie side at the moment. I'm on my fourth test on that at the moment to get the best orientation. One thing I do notice is that I can detect a slight layering on some faces of a printed part but when I give give it a light coat of thinner, the layering pretty well disappears. Some S scale and 1:32 scale Caledonian axleboxes and springs. The lettering is mirrored - finding out the hard way that Chitubox does this by default. I've now found the setting and changed it. :-) Caledonain buffers in S scale Trying out different orientations on 1:32 scale Caledonian springs. Jim.

I would be interested to see if there is. And whether parts like the 5W head are available separately to fit on an E1. I get the feeling that the board might have to be changed as well to match the characteristics of the new head. The price of the Core looks like being around £770 plus VAT and Import tax. Jim.

For cutting strips I use one of these https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Master-Airscrew-Balsa-Wood-Stripper-Tool-MA4000-/283298078597 For thin styrene, cut right through with the balsa stripper, for thicker styrene and plywood, use the cut of the stripper as a guide for a knife or Olfa blade. Jim.

We will put a shilling in the meter. :-) Jim

I worked with some Alan Gibson 7mm driving wheels some years ago and found that the brass was quite "soft". If a press fit was machined, the wheel would press fit well first time but if it was removed and tried again, the wheel was an easy fit on the axle and no longer a push fit. I think I remember tinning the axle ends with soft solder which restored the press fit. But if I was going to use these wheels again I think I would have used telescopic axles so that the axle stubs were push fitted once and never had to be removed again. Jim.

Have you considered drawing and printing body and roof as separate items which might get over the problems of proper support for each? If the roof had a plug on the underside fitting in the body, then assembly would be easy. I'm following this with interest. I've just acquired a Shuffle and my problem at the moment is getting up to speed with a 3D CAD package - my thirty years of 2D CAD skills aren't helping much. :-) Jim.

A small CNC router?? :-) Jim PS By the way, got some 4D 1.5mm MDF recently and I'm looking at trying it out soon and comparing with the Maple Street MDF I Have used up till now. jim.

David, Just found this entry coming top of the pile in a search for "grbl setting different working 0,0" https://github.com/grbl/grbl/issues/257 and there seemed to be a lot more in a similar vein which I haven't dug into yet. :-) Jim.

Dave, First, the problem with considering Mach3 is that it is really very obsolete. It was designed to run on an older Windows 32 bit system and it interfaces with the CNC machine via the old parallel port. It is well nigh impossible to get a suitable PC these days unless you go to the secondhand re-sellers who might just have something suitable. My system is still running on a secondhand Dell 32bit running WinXP but I am considering getting a POkeys box which will replace the parallel port interface so that I could run it on more modern machines. But on a recent Win 10 update, Mach3 stopped working and someone did a bit of quick hacking on one of the versions to get round the problem - I run it on my Win10 PC just to check out GCode before going anywhere near the CNC setup. So I would find it difficult to recommend Mach3 since it could get you into further messes in trying to set up an obsolete system. The restriction on the free version is the number of lines it will run, which I think is 500. That seems a lot of lines until you run into a job with a lot of intricate moves. It might be worth joining a forum like MYCNCUK - http://www.mycncuk.com/index.php - where there are a lot of people who are building their own systems and who might be able to suggest inexpensive solutions to your problem. As for GRBL, when using it with my Emblaser 1 I reckon that the controller knows the envelope of your setup and the only physical link between the GRBL controller and the machinery are the two micro switches which it uses to establish the machine home in the top right corner. The operating zero is diagonally opposite. I found that I had to establish a holder which set the corner of my material to 0,0 so that I could relate the laser head to the material with some accuracy. I'm not sure how I could use GRBL with a CNC setup where setting up coordinates by touching off to the workpiece is the norm. I'm sure we are not the first people to have run into this problem and I would suspect that a good hunt round the Internet with Google might well find similar matters being raised and possibly generate some answers as well. :-) I might have a look around later on but I'm up to my eyes at the moment trying to get my head round another 3D CAD program before a 3D printer lands on my doorstep. :-) Jim.

Dave, I think you might be falling foul of the way GRBL works. I use it to drive my Emblaser 1 laser cutter and, basically, I have to work to the 0,0 set by GRBL. Here's a web page discussing it. https://github.com/grbl/grbl/issues/257 I suspect you want to work as if using a controller like Mach3 where you can position your head then zero the counters and that becomes the home position for the job in hand. Jim.

Thanks. Jim.

In case I can't find it with Google, have you got a URL for the podcast? Jim.

Will that allow upgrading parts of the E1? I remember some discussion before the E2 came out about its laser eventually becoming available to update an E1. Jim.

I've also got a glass base on my E1 and that does show a lot of evidence of etching. I use Barkeepers' Friend to clean off all the muck that accumulates with MDF cutting and the roughness from etching is very obvious when cleaning the glass. I tend to draw everything starting at 1,1 so the bottom left hand corner of my glass is getting quite opaque. :-) Jim.

Apologies to Simon for the thread drift and thanks for your response. I'm thinking of getting a Phrozen Shuffle which is a bit more expensive version of the same idea. It has had good reviews and there is a good distributor in the UK who uses the machine himself. https://www.bluecastjewellery.com/phrozen-shuffle/ Jim.

Simon, Sorry, I had misread some of your earlier messages when I thought you were doing multiple passes. I envy your 40W capability. Multiple passes cutting out large pieces can be a long process on a 4W diode. :-) Jim.

What printer? Jim.

Simon, Good news that you had a successful replacement. I note from your tests for number of cuts to get a cut through that you use the same as I used to - i.e. cutting squares of (I guess) 10mm side length. Do you find that the results from these tests are slightly under when you cut much longer perimeters. I have found on my 4W Emblaser 1 that I usually have to increase the number of cuts by at least one if I have done the test with 10mm squares. I wondered if it was the MDF retaining some heat with the shorter perimeter and improving the effectiveness of succeeding cuts. Jim.

I take this all back - it's V9.5 for CNC milling. It's only just dawned on me when I installed it and tried to work on some laser files. :-) Hopefully there will be a similar upgrade for the laser version. Jim.

As a side issue, a free update of Cut2D has just been announced - V9.5. I downloaded it yesterday but I haven't yet installed it. Here's a video describing some of the additions. And here's a much more informative (IMHO :-) ) web page on the improvements https://docs.vectric.com/docs/V9.5/Cut2DLaserDesktop/ENU/Help/Reference%20Manual/Whats%20New/Whats%20New.html I will also check out if they have sorted out the annoyance of resetting the line position to "ON" when recalling a vector to edit it. I haven't been working my machine recently, having to get involved in making scenery for my layout, but I could start churning more stuff out in a few weeks' time. I am now finding that the machine, and me!!!, have settled down and I can now fire it up and cut something with no hassle. If the V9.5 has sorted out the unwanted modifying of edited profiles, then I can store small sample files of all the materials I use to act as aide memoires when setting up. Modifying my laser head also means that I can whip it off quickly to clean the lens and replace it without losing the focus setting. Jim.