RepRap Prescription: juni 2011

tirsdag 21. juni 2011

torsdag 16. juni 2011

My biggest print yet, and it's creepier than I thought it would be.

I've always wanted to print one of these, and when a simple straight-to-skeinforge-version with non-broken stl files was posted by RoTorIT - http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:9321 - I had no excuses any more. Thanks a lot. :)

The body piece is 22cm across, and printed diagonally it took every single mm of bed space I have available, which turns out to be 170x185mm. I even had to turn off skirt to make it fit, and it came dangerously close to the bolt heads on the bed. But it was totally worth it. the spider is HUGE.

Total print time was close to 24 hours @55mm/s. I had to print one piece at a time, because for some bizarre unknown reason I lose y steps if I print several objects at the same time. Some of the pieces are the same, and I'll post them here for your enjoyment:

Part 6 & 7
Part 8 & 9
Part 20, 22, 24, 26 (small leg)
Part 21, 23, 25, 27 (large leg)

The pieces doesn't fit together that well, and could have been 0.5mm fatter. Though both the mouth parts and tail parts sits tight amongst each piece and locks itself in place, the legs sit quite loose. I sort of solved it by squeezing / bending the print a bit while hot off the printer, which made most of it sit pretty nice.

In case you didn't notice already, it's printed in transculent blue PLA from Ultimachine, which is UV reactive. It looked far less scary when I took the pictures last night.

Imagine this scenario: You place the spider in a dark corner of the basement, with the room lit only by a single bulb. Then you hook up a motion detector which turns off the bulb and turns on several UV leds pointed at the spider. I'd do it, but it'll probably be smashed to pieces in blind arachnophobia fear, and I really don't feel like printing another one (before I have a giant bot farm).