Wednesday, June 8, 2011

First print of complete butterfly dome


Here it is, right off the printer table. It's filled with support material, a necessary evil for my machine.


After some patient cleanup work, here's the finished dome. Happy! :)


Not a great photo, but here it is on the partially-assembled Ideal Harmonic Transformer.

7 comments:

  1. I've been wondering, which part of the toolchain produces the support material?

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  2. I ask because I have a homebrew 3d printer and I'm interested in getting this style of support material going.

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  3. My machine has one nozzle, and one material. The "supports" are designed by the software as part of the print process, and there is a layer of very fine strands right next to the part itself. It works like perforated paper; if you get it separating right, it comes off pretty cleanly.

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  4. So the software that came with the printer for converting the model into instructions for the machine adds the support?

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  5. Yep, you've got it. :) Sorry if that isn't much help for your home-brew setup. I have had cases where I print "raftless" (telling the software not to make support), and I've modeled in a support in a small area that needed it. That worked fine too.

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  6. Skeinforge has a support option that achieves this. The resulting support material can be seen in this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RNwsbvn-3k

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  7. Mine can be more like folds of stiff paper where there is a large volume of support, then swaps to the thin strands like in the video, close to the part. If that's what skeinforge does, then it looks like a good choice.

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