Monthly Archives: May 2011

Selectively making parts of object stronger on RepRap with Skeinforge

Less is sometimes more. I want to publish really simple hack how to make part of object stronger when you use Skeinforge for slicing. (It’ll probably work even in other slicers). This is part of Skeinforge how-to I’m preparing to publish here.

Why less is sometimes more? When you have void or hole in your object, Skeinforge has to do shells around it. And even will bind some of infill to it. If the hole has perimeter smaller then lets say 0.5mm radius, the overall density in this part of object will increase, the hole wont appear on object anyway and you can save some plastic in compare to increasing overall infill density!!

Picture is more then 1000 words :-)

Will produce this

More holes you add, more stronger the part of object will be. Of course till you hit state where the holes are too close to each other. Experimentation is needed. In my case, it reinforced the weak parts of X-ENDs in my felt branch of Prusa Mendel.

What I will try next, is small slots in the part, where by rotation of them you could control in which direction object will be stronger. To get an idea, I did a small mockup pic. Again the slots will be small enough to be unprintable, but big enough to force Skeinforge to making stronger infill :-)

Thermal goodness

I managed to get some thermal images of printing RepRap, thanks to David Kuboš.

Here you can see my Prusa Mendel printing Buddha. Notice the last line is really hot. But notice the heat coming from inside object? Its from heatbed.

Another nice picture. Line seems almost same hot as the insulated heater. Also look that object is same hot as heatbed.

Pretty cool overlay. Temperature trashold was set to 50°C I would say.

1/4 of heatbed is visible here, you can see that in temperature in corner is about 10°C lower then in center :-) Temps are not precise, since the heatbed doesn’t have right coating for precise measurements, but the relative difference should remain same.

Printing with real image overlay.

Heat coming from bottom. Printer is doing perimeter in the red pointer it has 133°, while the rest of object is 75°C.

I want to thank again David Kuboš for his time at Prague For Industry fair.
If you need thermal cameras and you are from Czech Republic, you can find David at www.tmvss.cz