Makerbot News

Just a few things on the 3D printing front...

Ordered this upgrade kit, designed by wphthomas and packaged up (with permission) by scvette.  Looks like a lot of people (including Bre) are saying nice things about this.

tldr: more reliable filament feed.



http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:42250
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/makerbot/-8PWUKprZ6g
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:42250#comment-795520449

And notes from one of our resident printmasters:

I recently experimented with some different print settings and thought I would share my findings.  Mostly with black PLA, though the final part was in red. 

240 deg / 60 extruder speed - the print starts getting messy.  I can see the extruder pushing around a lot of mush.  Too hot, IMHO. 

240 / 80 - filament gets very thin.  Feeding seems to be struggling to keep up.  No bueno.
Ended up going with 230 / 60, my tried and true settings for print you see in the attached picture. 

If anyone else is making large, flat prints, you know they can be really frustrating to get off the build plate.  So I picked up a plastic putty scraper at Home Depot.  It now lives by the printer.  Go slow and keep the putty knife flat to the plate to avoid snapping your part in half (not that I would know). 

MakerBot Replicator 2 Notes

Very exciting, I was able to try out the new MakerBot!  Here's some notes on getting things set up.

Note: Replicator 2 uses only PLA.

I'll come back and revise some of the missing parts (e.g. the menu instructions) after  I get a chance to go through the steps again.



Power on (switch on rear right)

Load Filament

• snake the filament through the clear tube, from the back
• detach clear tube from printhead
• select menu:  utilities/filament/load (left arrow is back)
• feed filament into head
• you will feel the feeder take over
• let filament go until it touches the baseplate
• push the M button to stop filament feed
• attach clear tube to printhead

Printing from computer

• attach usb cable; usb cable falls between the two tables, fish out through the middle
• run makerware, get your model ready
• click "The Replicator 2" button
• advanced parms:  set feed travel to 60 cm/min (default is 80) for better results
• select raft and supports if you need them
• see notes below on detaching
• do something to disable sleep or you will blow your print.  on our macs, push the mouse to the bottom left corner.
• click print.
• when the unit starts, it will draw a line of filament from the front left corner to the start of the model.  watch for that, if this filament line is bad cancel your print.  

Printing from SD card

• fiddle with your settings as above
• we're still pre-7 firmware, so save as S3D
• use an SD card of 2G or less
• put your card in the slot
• menu: utilities/filament/unload

To Detach

• the baseplate will detach, push the rear tab back
• blue painters tape can be put on the baseplate to ease detachment
• lightly sand the tape for better adhesion, so the melted filament doesn't move around

Wrapping up

• log piece(s) in logbook
• unfeed filament (menu:)
• power off

And here's my first test piece!  It's a sizer for metric nuts and bolts.  No numbers printed in this version though.  Next up:  camera carrier for Bixler 2.