We recently got our hands on some flexible filament samples, kindly provided to us by the guys at FormFutura. One commonly encountered problem with these filaments is their tendency to bend, buckle and loop between the extruder’s hobbed bolt and the top of the hotend. Enter the FlexyStruder, an extruder made by LulzBot to deal specifically with flexible filaments.
Category Archives: 3D Printer
Printing wood
We bought some wooden filament and it’s finally here. So today is wood printing day!
We’re still figuring out what are the correct settings for this filament but it looks so sexy in our printer that we wanted to share a picture of it.
Disaster! And recovery.
We’d been having some problems with our 3D printer, where at seemingly random moments, it would miss a lot of steps (up to 5mm!) on the X-axis. I suspected that the belt was too loose, which was the case, but when I tried to tighten it, disaster struck:
Adding a print server with Octopi
For the last month we’ve been printing with the laptop attached to the printer, what we found pretty inconvenient because it takes a lot of space on our table.
Some weeks ago, we’ve heard about Octoprint, a web based print server ready to plug in a Raspberry Pi with any distro that has an http server installed. It looks like a great idea, but we found something even better: Octopi.
Octopi is a distro based in Raspbian with the octoprint server setted up, basically plug and play. So we took one of the Pis that we have around and, I have to say, intalling it couldn’t be more simple!
Printing a fan mount
We were having very good results printing with the black PLA without any extra cooling, but the green PLA that we wanted to use was not so cooperative. PLA tends to stay soft for a little time after extrusion. While this is nice because it lets the printed layers fuse together well, it can also cause the finer details of your prints to warp and sag. One advice commonly found on the Internet says to add a small fan to blow cold air over your print, to make the PLA cool down faster. It seemed worth a try.
Our RepRap Prusa Mendel iteration 3
So here it is: our RepRap Prusa Mendel iteration 3 in all its glory. It is based on the kit sold by cookinghacks.com; we have started to make a few modifications: