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Jason's Workbench (was 3D printed buildings)


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  • 1 year later...
  • RMweb Gold

It’s been a year and a quarter since my last confession. For the first time since I moved I am able to permanently out the printer somewhere, and now I’m getting back up to speed with the Ender 3 And all of its little gotchas 🙂

 

I went crazy and decided that, instead of printing something small, I’d test print my skills with a reprint of the Havenhouse station in PLA. Well, I’ve got some fine tuning to do! It’s not absolutely awful, but things could be a lot better. The window bars I’m definitely pleased with, but the stretcher brick edges are too rounded and the gaps too big. Interestingly, in the dear wing, the gap between bricks in the stretcher layers are the same as those in the header layers.

 

It’s currently printed on a .4mm nozzle with a .2mm layer height. Now I’ve done this, I’ll see about making a smaller wall and try to produce some better samples.

if anyone has any advice, then I’d be happy to receive it!

 

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Edited by JCL
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One way to get better prints, is to break the model down and print it as a kit.

If you lay a wall section flat in the printer bed you can get some great window designs and the glazing bars can be .4mm thick.

The brickwork will also come out a lot better.

All my brickwork prints get a rub with 40 grit abrasive. It hides the printer marks and give the bricks some texture.

Plenty of pics on my Essex Brick posts. All the buildings in the pics printed with a .4 nozzle.

 

Building 002 (04).jpg

Building 002 (10).jpg

Building 002 (13).jpg

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  • RMweb Gold
On 28/07/2023 at 17:50, JCL said:

if anyone has any advice, then I’d be happy to receive it!

 

21 hours ago, chris p bacon said:

Give up bricklaying....😀

 

Is it time for a tea break?

 

I thought I'd better check - that mug of Earl Grey in front of me won't drink itself.

 

 

5 hours ago, EDDY100 said:

One way to get better prints, is to break the model down and print it as a kit.

If you lay a wall section flat in the printer bed you can get some great window designs and the glazing bars can be .4mm thick.

The brickwork will also come out a lot better.

All my brickwork prints get a rub with 40 grit abrasive. It hides the printer marks and give the bricks some texture.

Plenty of pics on my Essex Brick posts. All the buildings in the pics printed with a .4 nozzle.

 

Excellent advice, as usual - and the photos / models also look the part.

 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • RMweb Gold

Good news! Watching Time Team on YouTube I decided to make a trench… or rather take a small part of the building, and reprint it using standard settings, this time at a .12mm layer height. This small piece of industrial archaeology took 75 minutes to print, but it looks a whole lot better than the previous go.

 

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  • 1 month later...
  • RMweb Gold

I haven’t been able to add photos from my pc for some reason, and then I realised I can reply from my phone.


24 hours after setting the print off I printed the shell. It’s pretty sturdy and dropping it on the floor (by accident!) didn’t harm it. I have to clear the windows out, but I’m very pleased with it.

 

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I’ve also been testing some upscaling. I’ve a GNR railcar I drew up a couple of years ago. I printed it in 4mm and @chris p bacon kindly motorised it for me. To test my Ender I’ve printed a portion of it in 7mm scale, and I think it came out ok. Before I print the full thing I’ll need to set up some supports for the tops of the windows, but, yeah, it’s looking ok.

 

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  • 4 weeks later...
  • RMweb Gold

Tthis is a long one - or at least it looks long on my phone…
 

I’ve had a chance to sort out my printer. It’s been running fine but not great for a while, depositing blobs on the model and generating “candy floss” at the nozzle. So last night I set to, and using this video, I cleaned out its hot-end using the video below for reference.

 


I found that the end of the PTFE tube had deteriorated pretty badly. The end was burnt and there was gunk on it.

 

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After freeing up the end, I used my 3D printed pipe cutter to slice off the damaged part.

 

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Then after I put it all back together, I decided to change the operating system. My current one, Jyers, is no longer supported, snd everyone is talking about the benefits of using MRiscoC, so I moved to that one  using this video.

 

 

The only fly in the ointment is you need to use an 8GB card to do this, and I no longer have one, so I used some partitioning software to make a 32GB card pretend to be an 8 GB card.

 

I'm really pleased I made the change, as the levelling/tramming is a lot easier than before, and the whole thing feels much better thought out.

 


After that I created the mesh that maps the flatness of the build plate, and test printed a cube. The PLA brand I used has given me a lot of gyp, (so much that I almost considered donating it to a local Makerspace), but after the clean it printed well!.

 

Just before a huge storm hit this evening (electricity is out in the next town over, and it’ll be here anytime now), a 6 hour print of a railcar underframe in 7mm has completed. It’s my best print for a while.


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I printed a skirt at a distance of 0mm just to catch the tips of the cross braces.

 

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Next is the rest of the chassis, then the body, and finally the roof. 
 

Onwards and upwards!

 

JCL

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  • RMweb Gold
On 18/10/2023 at 06:33, MikeTrice said:

The other tip is to use capricorn tube when you come to replace it.

Thanks Mike, I have some in one of 15 boxes from my move two years ago ... 😐

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