Pixar Lamp has Light Now

Long ago I 3D printed a Pixar light. Recently I added a bicycle light to it so it actually works :) Looks nice I think. I'm currently working on a big project in my living room that I'm going to show you in the future. It involves lots of gadget that I'm transforming with electronics. I thought it would be nice to share these projects with you. Maybe it will make your day more enjoyable maybe it inspires you to do the same. More to follow soon!
 

Another useful 3D print for the Aquarium

My daughter has an aquarium in her bed room and some times when we are away we want the fish to get their food automatically, so we have a feeding machine. The problem was though to find a good spot for it. My wife asked me if I could come up with something so I though I could maybe make something on the 3D printer. First thing was so measure the thickness of the glass and start drawing a design in Cinema 4D.

Here is a close up of the design. It is a simple 15 x 15 cm plateau with an edge below with a 5mm gap so that it fits around the glass. I though it would take a couple of version to get an exact fit, but actually the first print was perfect right away :) My daughter chose this green color for the plastic. The whole print took about 20 hours on the Ultimaker 2. So again it was a nice feeling to be able to design and print something useful with the 3D printer :)

Two more Ultimaker 2 prints

 Here is one more print I did on the Ultimaker 2. Looks a bit like the Pixar lamp doesn't it :) I really love it. It was printed in separate parts that you could snap together. Well snap sounds easy but actually it took quite some force and even pliers to get it fitted in, but I think it looks great now. The whole thing is only 15 centimeters tall, so that should give you an idea of the detail. I had most trouble printing the foot. With the white material it just didn't look very good with infill on it. So eventually I decided to print everything without infill at all. So all parts are completely solid. The difference in quality compared to the K8200 is amazing I think.

Here is another print I did. For you who don't recognize it, it is a robot for the famous Terminator movies. I was printed with support that I had to break up and I didn't really clean it yet. Unfortunately it was not completely successful. The part of the head you don't see isn't there ;) After 50 hours of printing the whole thing fell over and I had to cancel the print. I still don't know what happened. I will have another go at it for sure. In the mean time I learned a lot again about working with the Ultimater 2, so I'm sure at some point I will have a full one, but I already love the detail on it.

My second generation 3D Printer the Ultimaker 2

After building the K8200 I was very enthusiastic about 3D printing and I already printed lots of stuff for other people as well. For printing real 3D objects I found the resolution of the K8200 too low though. It can print with an accuracy up to 100 micron (0,1 mm). In it self that is not bad, but then I came across the new Ultimaker 2. It actually can print up to 25 micro (0,025 mm). I can tell you that is a lot of difference. Also it is pretty quick.The downside is though that I have to learn printing all over again. Different speeds, different temperatures and different materials and of course different software. I spend the last months getting to know this printer and finally I'm getting some results.

Here is a picture of the first serious thing I printed. A fully working wrench :) It is printed with some support material that you have to break away. In this picture that is already done. But as you can see the result is pretty spectacular. I still have lots of problems with the printer. Some prints came loose from the heated bed and fell over. I don't know why. Some print I have trouble with warping/curling of the material. I just got new software again where I can adjust temperature per layer. Unfortunately 3D printing is still not as easy as people that sell these printers want you to believe, even with this second generation printer. But eventually I will get there. Getting to know the K8200 cost me a couple of months as well.

3D Print for the Kids

I didn't use the 3D printer for a while since it actually broke down. I had some material stuck in the extruder and couldn't get it out. When I removed the print head I could push it out, but accidentally damaged the NTC resistor that measures the heads temperature, so I had to replace that as well. Well that is all done now. Another problem I had was that the material didn't stick well to the print bed. After reading and experimenting a lot I finally decided to stick blue 3M scotch tape to the bed and now it prints like a charm :)

But what to print then to test if it is working OK again. I decided it was time to print something for my kids. I have two daughters in the age of 11 and 13 so what to print for them. Well I did print a nice T-Rex puzzle for myself a while ago and back then I found some more of those so I started to look with them for something they would like. And we did find this very nice one. Here is a picture of all the parts and then look what you can make from that :)

A very nice butterfly. Actually it isn't as easy as it looks to put it together. Since the printer has some tolerance some parts don't with and you will have to use a knife to make the connections a but smoother and then still you need some force to put the parts together. The good side about this is that once it fits it won't fall apart easily. By now I have quite some colors of PLA print material on stock so they could choose their own colors.

As you might have guessed my oldest daughter wanted one in pink and the youngest in yellow. A nice project that took my mind of work for some time. I have been way too busy lately to be honest. Printing and building a butterfly like this is a whole day's work by the way. Of course you can do other things while printing, but still you have to keep an eye on the printer as well as somethings things go wrong. Here is a last picture of both of them together.

Makerbot 3D Tractor Puzzle

Hi, I'm currently printing parts on my 3D printer for a tractor. The original design is my Makerbot, but I could not find any construction howto. Besides that I'm currently working on a 3D scene for my virtual render farm and I wanted a tractor in that scene as well and I though I would be fun to use the same one. So I started importing all the different parts from STL into Cinema 4D and layed them out and first of all gave them  some material to be able to identify them better.

Then I started building the thing together. I noticed right away that not everything is a tight fit by the way, but I guess a bit of glue can fix that on the plastic model eventually. For reference I used some pictures I found on the internet from other people that build it. Here is an in between render where I already assembled some sub components like the engine block, chassis, hood, and wheels. The big parts are quite logical, but there also are a lot of small parts where I really struggled where they should go.

In the end I even had 3 surplus parts. I really have no idea where they should go and everything looks alright to me :) In the picture you see the finished model. All in all it took me a Saturday evening to put it together. Printing the parts takes a lot longer, but at least now I know how much parts to print and also what colors and where they should go. I will make little 360 degree animation of the whole thing so other people might benefit from it. And if anyone does have a howto with clear instructions feel free to post the link here. OK back to work now :)

First Useful 3D print

Today I finished my first usefull 3D print. The machine you see on the left is our coffee machine. Once in a while it needs cleaning and then there is water coming from the two nozzles left and right. Since there is not much space and it is quite a lot of water coming out of it, my wife usually has to pay attention since she has to empty the stuff she used to put under there half way. But it always is a bit messy. So we came up with the idea to make custom made compartments to hold the water.

As you can see in the picture on the right this is quite a large object already for the printer. It also took about 20 hours to print each of them. I designed the whole thing in Cinema 4D by the way and then exported to STL format. It is really nice to be able to make something like this just from software I already know :) Yesterday we did the first cleaning cycle with them and it worked out really fine. So another project finished.

It might look easy by the way, but I can assure you that this project took a lot of time. I also had a misprint where the PLA on the role got tangled :( So after 15 hours of printing or so, I could start all over again. So far every time I walk away from a print, something goes wrong. So I now plan my prints when I'm at home the whole day. So yes... 3D printing is nice. But it is time consuming and you need to know what you are doing. I'm really looking in to a more professional printer now, to hopefully get better quality and less hassle. I'll keep you posted :)

Another 3D Print - Star Wars Tie Fighter

Last week suddenly I heard a noise and I saw the extruder of the 3D printer I build hanging on only one screw. I tried to fasten everything again, but I had no luck what so ever. So before I could do any more printing I had to take the whole extruder apart, fasten the screws a but more and put it back together. That was a little setback, but unfortunately it didn't end there. After that I had to recalibrate the head distance and I had no luck in that.

The material just didn't want to stick to the heated print bed anymore. I tried cleaning with alcohol, rubbing it a bit with sand paper like I did before, but no luck. Then I started looking on some forums for a solution and I found one. Painters tape! Very cheap stuff that you can just stick on the print bed and after that I printed like a charm. I guess by now you would have guessed from seeing the pictures of a print in progress.

The model I printed came from ThingiVerse and it is a tie fighter from Star Wars. I really like the look of that model. It consisted of three separate printable parts that you eventually have to glue together. But before I got to this point there was some more trouble. After the first print was finished, the material was stuck to the painters tape so well, that I couldn't get it off. I printed in PLA and that is quite fragile, so I could not use too much force since then the material would break.

So again I went to look for a solution and I found one. The tip was to use a spraycan with compressed air, put it up side down on purpose so that the stuff coming out is frozen. This cools the object to quickly that it shrinks a bit and pops loose. And guess what? It worked :) I will go and look now though for blue painters tape since they say this is less sticky. So that is worth the experiment. All in all the model is done and I really like it. But again I found out that printing on a DIY 3D printer is not so easy as it looks. Ah well most important thing. It still works. Up to the next project.