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3DLabPrint PolyLight filament

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I had always heard about the LW PLA filaments and how much weight you can save, but one of the things that discouraged me from trying it was the cost. The most common LW PLA runs about $50 for a 700g roll which makes it rather expensive even though it goes further than standard PLA.

When 3dLabPrint released their new PolyLight LW PLA at the same price but a full 1kg spool I decided to give it a try. First off I love the color they picked, a light grey is easy to paint whatever color you want, and for the model I want to print (the MIG) it actually won’t need to be painted and still will look very good.

So first things first I did the first test of printing various cubes at different temperatures to see what temperature gave me the greatest expansion. It turns out that for my printer (a BIQU B1) it’s at 260 which is also the upper limit on the temperature for this printers nozzle. I then printed various cubes at different flow rates from 90% all the way down to 30%. During this testing I found that 40% was spot on based on the tests.

So for the first ‘real’ print I went ahead and printed a benchy. It had lots of stringing (which I was expecting, I basically used my normal PLA profile and just changed the temp and flow rate) and holy cow I couldn’t believe how light it was and it still had excellent strength.

So now on to a standard plane part. I decided to print the wing tip from the easymax, as it’s a nice quick print and it should tell me what I want to know, basically are there any issues printing with the LW PLA. The first print I did with the standard internal support didn’t come out that great. About half way through it started having trouble because of the retractions. So for the second attempt I went ahead and turned off all retraction.

That made a huge difference and the wingtip printed out just fine with all the structures. Only thing was it was extremely flexible, like silly flexing when I pulled it off the bed.

So for the third attempt I increased the flow rate up to 50% and while it did improve the stiffness a little bit, there was still way to much flexibility. Now the surface of the print looked fine (except for the stringing which was easily sanded/cut off) and the layer adhesion was very good.

For the fourth attempt I turned on the infill to about 15% just plane cubic infill and that came out awesome. The part printed in regular PLA weighs 17.5 g and the one in PolyLight weighs 5.65 about 70% lighter than a standard PLA part and it was stiffer than the other attempts.

Glueing the parts together worked very well too, nice solid glue joints and I imagine the foamy structure helps the glue get absorbed a bit more than standard PLA.

I’m super happy with the filament and I’m really looking forward to printing an entire plane now and seeing how it comes out.

Here’s a few pictures of the prints: Picture Gallery

Printing with Priline Carbon Fiber Polycarbonate

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Well someone in my RC club asked me if I could print some parts for him. It’s a variety of parts from wheel pants, a gopro mount and some two material washers with TPU on the bottom to give it a little cushion.

I saw the Priline CF PC on amazon and decided to give it a try. At first glance the surface is rather rough, but since I’ve got a direct drive I don’t think that’ll cause me any issues. The first two prints were done at 240/70 and I had problems with adhesion so I decided to try printing it with a raft. It’s printing very well with a raft, so the next time I’ll probably try increasing the bed temperature a little bit. Judging by the failed prints the 240 temp is just fine, the layers are bonding well and the parts are very strong without being brittle.

It has a LOT of strength compared to PETG or the other CF PETG I’ve tried, so far I’m impressed with this filament.

The first part I’m printing is the GoPro mount and I’ll post pictures when it completes.

The wheel pant I’m going to print out of PETG in red, then I might try printing one using the CF PC and he’ll have to paint it but it should be super strong.

New printers

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Well I’ve got two new printers, one still is waiting to ship the other is here and printing.

I backed the CR-6 SE on kickstarter and now I’m just waiting for it to ship along with the add-ons I selected.

  • The other printer is an Ender 3 V2 which I’ve been hearing lots of good things about, especially that it’s a 32 bit board with silent stepper drivers. It arrived yesterday and went together in less than an hour and here’s my first impressions of it.

  • The instruction manual seems to be much better than the original ender 3, much less confusing on how to put things together so that was very welcome.

  • Typical excellent packing, nothing was damaged or missing.

  • First test print was perfect, very encouraging.

  • I love the color screen, and the menu system is laid out very well.

  • Don’t like the fact that the creality slicer is Windows only.

  • But using Cura with the default ender 3 profile is printing absolutely gorgeous prints, so that’s REALLY nice.

  • Some people have complained about the weak bed springs, but so far I’ve not had any issues.

  • Hooking up Octoprint had one issue, the temp readouts are all wonky, but someone in the octoprint community has already posted a fix for it and it worked great.

Looking forward to really putting this printer through its paces.

This may be a printer that I don’t upgrade. The only possible upgrades I can think of would be a BLTouch, which it has a connector already in the board but right now I’m not having any leveling issues.

The other is something that I probably will install and that’s the filament runout sensor. I’ve found that to be very convenient in a couple of different ways.

New Patreon that is awesome

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I found out about this patreon on my favorite youtube channel 3d printing nerd (go check Joel out he is awesome). But he told me about Clockspring3d someone who designs really amazing print in place objects, and he has TONS of designs and takes suggestions. His Patreon is only $8 per month to be able to download and print his designs which is totally worth it, I’ve got a line up of things to print that I think are going to be awesome!!!!

Finally gave the Mosquito HotEnd by Slice Engineering a try and switching to Cura for Slicing

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Well I needed to replace a hotend on my printer and I decided to go ahead and give the Mosquito hotend by Slice Engineering a try. It is quite a bit more expensive than other hotends but after installing it and using it for about a week I now totally understand the benefits (at least for me that is).

  1. The melt zone is SMALL. I’m talking like 2-3 mm at most. This means you can really cut down the retraction on your slicing.

  2. Having the very small melt zone also means I was able to switch from Direct drive back to a bowden setup. I switched to a bowden setup and just dealt with the ringing in my print because of the weight, also the filament path was not ideal especially since i’ve installed a filament sensor. Switching to a bowden makes for a much cleaner setup IMHO.

  3. Simple install. I was able to use a minimalist hotend mount (I’m using the groovemount adapter) so my x-carriage is MUCH cleaner than it used to be. Also printing the mount (even though I only had to do it once) was very fast.

  4. Probably the biggest feature I love about this hotend is how simple it is to change the nozzle. I just use the wrench and voila, the nozzle is off and back on in under 30 seconds probably. And I don’t have to juggle a hot nozzle or use another pair of pliers or wrench to hold the heat break. I’ve been switching nozzles now a lot more than I ever have in the past based on what I’m printing, not just if I have a lot of things to print that justifies a nozzle change.

  5. Being able to print up to 450C is nice, I got the Slice Engineering cartridge and thermistor and now there’s even support built in to Marlin for their thermistor cartridge.

About the only thing I don’t like is that the nozzles they sell are 6mm instead of 7mm like the majority of the E3D nozzles and clones out there. But I already got an adapter for their torque wrench so I’ve got that covered as well.

OctoFarm is a requirement if you run multiple printers

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I found a YouTube video about this application about a month ago and last week I tried installing it on docker but it didn't go so well. I read that it needed a 64 bit is to run mongo DB and everything I had seen said it didn't run on a raspberry pi. I looked again today and found an article on installing 64 bit Ubuntu on a raspberry pi using the new raspberry pi imager application.

So I grabbed a pi 4 and installed Ubuntu. It took me two tries to get vnc working but then I went through the steps for installing OctoFarm in a ‘production’ environment and got it up and running. The only issue I had was that the controls weren't working and then I found another YouTube video describing that you have to enable CORS on octoprint then everything started working.

Definitely check it out if you run octoprint and multiple printers.

More Bumblebee stuff

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At dinner tonight I got to thinking about the best way to power the Raspberry Pi and it came to me.  A very simple, effective, and inexpensive solution.

Instead of using a 7805 regulator I am using a BEC that normally I use in my RC airplanes.  The one I have right now is rated at 5 amps at either 5 or 6v.  Sure enough when I wired it up to the Pi everything started up just fine and I'm running some test prints just to be sure, but I think it's going to work out great.

It even has a low voltage alert in case for any reason it stops getting the clean 5v, and it has filtering and smooth regulated power for the Pi.  Best part is they only cost about $6 and install in a flash.

So all I have left is to cleanly mount it and the wiring, then make a board for the lights and add switches to them both so I can turn the lights off and on, and install my emergency stop switch that will kill all power to the motors and the Rambo board in case of a  mechanical issue.

Bumblebee II is running again

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I finally got both my printers running again, the Hippie was pretty easy, it just needed a new hotend as the thermistor on the current one (which is over a year old) broke.

The Bumblebee II I was switching back to the E3D V6 hotend, and I was finally able to get it to print reliably and consistently.  I think the whole issue was related to my extruder, up until a few months ago I had been using a Maker Gear geared extruder and it had tons of torque so adjusting it wasn't that critical.  I switched to a Bulldog XL after the planetary gear was worn out in the Maker Gear extruder, and I had been struggling with getting consistent prints.  Half way through the print the filament would stop feeding, or it would strip it out.  I did some experiments with temperature and filament tension on the Bulldog and finally got the right settings.  I have to run the E3D a little hotter probably because of the active cooling, but the prints have been coming out great finally.

I started working on the onboard power system for the lighting and the Raspberry Pi and the lighting sections are working fine, but the Pi doesn't seem to be working correctly.  I need to pull out a monitor and keyboard and test it tonight, I'm not sure if it's not delivering enough current, but I also ordered 1.5a 7812 and 7805 chips from Mouser just so they won't run as hot.
 

Latest update

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Well since I didn't go to the maker faire I started doing a lot of long awaited fixes and upgrades to my Bumblebee II printer.  I'm putting the E3D V6 hot end back on it, building a regulator board to provide power for the Raspberry PI, and power for the lighting so I won't need separate power adapters.  I'll only have one power cord going forward.  I also am going to do the same thing for the Hippie so it too will only have the single power cord.

I'm toying with the idea of converting the Bumblebee to a Bowden extruder, I've got all the components except I need to print the extruder itself and the Bowden mount.  I think once I get some other things printed that I need to get down that'll be the next thing, then dual extrusion.

I have a prusa I3 kit to build, but it's going to be a group build with the robotics class so they can learn about 3d printers more, and we haven't gotten that scheduled yet.  But I've been going through the kit and looking at the parts and I have to say I'm very impressed for a $320 kit.  The only thing I think I'll be changing is using a RAMPS and a graphic LCD instead of the melzi, but I might try experimenting with the Melzi first to get the auto-bed leveling working.

I am also going to start building my 3DR rostock printer, which I'm very excited about.  That thing is just going to be a blast I think :)