I love faberdashery filament! It is beautiful (some even sparkles) and it is great to print with. But never, ever, ever try to print with a 100m coil straight out the bag. I tried this morning and spent two and a half hours cursing and swearing as it twisted and tangled. I’d try turning the coiled filament first one way then the other trying to see if it would be less twisted but nothing seemed to help.

I’ve made a little more progress with my metric version of the Cerberus. I’ve used openscad to modify the bottom tripod brace part to make it fit my 40mm extrusions. The new part has a slightly different “clip” to match the different profile. It was a terrible job to do in openscad but it fits nicely: Since I printed another bottom tripod part I now had enough tripod parts (with my earlier top and bottom test prints) to line them up on a 200x200mm heat bed to get an idea of the scale of the finished printer footprint:

I’ve been fascinated by delta bot printers since I saw the first videos of a Rostock. I also seem to enjoy making 3d printers as much as printing with them so I’ve decided to build a metric version of the Cerberus1. The original Cerberus uses 1.5inch square aluminium extrusions, 8020 1515lite, which aren’t readily available in the UK so I’ve decided to make a metric version based around 40mm square extrusions from KJN, ITM02633:

Tonight I completed the first part of a 3d printing experiment to make chocolates. I’ve been meaning to experiment with a Paste Extruder but I decided that this time I’d try printing with standard PLA filament and then making silicone moulds. First I printed a few Escher Lizards (scaled by 0.3) like this: Then I used some Hiflex Food and Skin Safe Silicone Putty Rubber Moulding Paste to make a mould.

Glow-in-the-dark filament is brilliant. I got mine from [reprapworld.com][]. Getting the extrusion temperature right so that the filament didn’t ooze out of the nozzle all over the place took a little time but it is ideal filament for printing Halloween goodies. I started with some simple objects from thingiverse. First I printed a couple of glow-in-the-dark spider webs: Then a brilliant glow-in-the-dark vampire skull: Then I spotted Reuben’s ghost hand print card and decided to try to make a 3d print version.

[I wrote this blog entry a while ago but I’d not gotten around to finishing it.] I’m sad to say I gave up trying to get my Sumpod 3d printer to work reliably. Despite spending a lot of time and effort, the fact is that the combination of problems with the extruder and the hot end made it not worth my time to get it working. (Some of the newer Sumpod models have improved the extruder and also allow mounting of the extruder at the hot end eliminating another potential source of problems - the Bowden tube - and some owners of the original Sumpod are making progress towards reliable prints so perhaps my Sumpod adventure is not quite over.

My Sumpod 3d printer now has several upgrades. I’ve upgraded the software to Marlin (Thanks to Stohn and Erik for the firmware.) This gives noticeable improvements in print quality and allows the printer to be driven a bit quicker. I’ve upgraded the hardware adding: an SD card reader (for printing without a computer), an rotary encoder (knob) to control the printer and navigate the SD card, and a speaker for feedback from the rotary encoder.

Now my Sumpod 3d printer is working, I’ve been taking requests for things to print. Tracy designed these with inkscape and I did the rest: Caleb asked for a blue snake. I did my best to design one: He loves it which is what matters but I think it needs more work - both the design and the printing. I did rather like watching it print especially the hex in-fill:

I’ve never been so pleased to see a pink alligator! Today I did exactly what I said I’d do in the previous blog post. First, I took apart the hot end of my Sumpod 3d printer to clean it. I’m not sure if Tracy approved but found a Brulee torch (like this one) made a perfect tool for cleaning the nozzle. I used it to burn off all the PLA from an earlier leak.

Today, I spent a bit of time cleaning out the hot end of my Sumpod 3d printer. I put everything back together making sure I was really pushing home the PTFE tube. Unfortunately prints are still messed up by intermittent jamming. I wondered if perhaps the jamming was corresponding to the natural temperature oscillations of the heating process. I did several prints at different temperatures (195’C, 200’C and 205’C) and videoed the process with the temperature reading visible on the LCD.

My Sumpod 3d printer arrived a while ago but it has taken me this long to paint (sand, paint again, sand again, …) the MDF. I finished most of the build last weekend. Since then, I’ve been attempting to calibrate it in any spare moment. After initial problems with the extruder and with the X axis belt being too loose, it does feel like I’m making progress. This print started quite well:

A month or so ago I bought Tracy a Silhouette Cameo cutter as an early Christmas present. Today she made some ‘Dad’ gift tags for my Christmas presents from my two lovely boys, so I thought I’d have a go at making some tags for her presents too. I think they came out quite well considering it was pretty much my first attempt at using inkscape and that we were using the robocut software rather than the official windows-only software.