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juerg posted an update 9 years, 2 months ago
3d printing with ease Please understand – I definitely do not want to create product placement in my blog – just let me tell you my InMoov printing difficulties. I first thought ABS and badly failed, nothing sticked to my print bed. Then listening and reading many experts opinions I switched to PLA. I gladly agreed because nothing worked with ABS and my fingers got printed successfully with PLA and lower temps. The drawback: trying to put the pieces together I broke them repeatedly and had to reprint them several times. So after a while I deceded to give ABS another chance and inhaled a lot of acetone because – at least for me – the only way to make the pieces stick to the print bed was ABS slurry – arrghhh – and the “should be best surface” got ruined when removing the parts. However – my parts got printed and my Marvin slowly got a shape! Then I started to try alternative print bed materials but without success and a rememberance of some bad smells – really bad I tell you – and costly too. Then I saw the material PLA-HT. It is available from multec, germany at a reasonable price. Unfortunately no color choice at the moment but have a look at the specs of this material (photo). This alone however was not good enough for me as I still had problems either with non-sticking or too-much sticking parts on the print bed. To the rescue – a reusable print bed material from the distributor mtplus in germany. It is a brownish shining plate on the print bed and when heated up to 50 degrees celcius (measure with a device – do not trust the printers display and adjust in the software accordingly) the pieces stick when the plate is warm and come off without any force when cooled down. Off course you still can have problems with your printer – as I had with a too tight y-axis ribbon – but printing for me changed from a lenghty problematic procedure to just – load stl, start print, wait (sleep over it), pick it up – and start next stl – never removing the print bed – never recalibrate your print bed. But wait – it’s just my way I am glad with at the moment- maybe you have your own success story to tell?
A Perfect Print Bed is like the quest for Holy Grail. All infos about it are welcome. What is the “rescue” material you finally use from mtplus? I tried so many things and materials for the perfect printing bed before starting InMoov project. Blue tape, UhU glue on glass, Buildtak, Ninja Board, ABS slurry on acrylic, bakelite and so on. I use Kapton on a FR4 epoxy sheet with sometimes a bit of ABS slurry which works great for 5 to 6 big prints, then bubbles start to appear, slowly degrading the first layer print. When it becomes too ugly, I change the Kapton.
I use a Velleman Vertex K8400 printer with an unheated glass bed with BuildTak. PLA sticks well to it. The BuildTak has to be replaced about once per month. I have never tested ABS. The printer has three fans to cool down the PLA. I have to use a lot of force to break any part. It they break, you may have to little infill or to thin walls. I use a file or sandpaper to make the surfaces smooth before mounting them togeter. Use grease to lubricate moving parts.
Hi Mats never seen BuildTak before but the web page promises exactly what I got with my material. I haven’t touched my printbed for 3 month’s now with printing times in average probably 3 hours/day. Juerg
It looks to be kept secret what material it is. It is also rather expensive but after having encountered so many problems I gave it a try (beside other materials) – and at least for me and my PLA-HT it works like a charm. When I compare ABS prints with the PLA-HT the second is much more robust (like I can not brake the large lower arm parts easily) and on my printer I use density 0.92 to avoid sticking. I do not know however about the quality of aged parts … I think my picture I tried to give of the material spec’s does not show up in the blog. The “notched impact strength” (do not know whether this is a known english expression for toughness) is PLA: 2.7, ABS: 15 and PLA-HT: 23. And it comes with no smells, low bed temp and is also easy to file (e.g. the blocking worm in the shoulder or the wrist parts that prevent MY servo to go down to the fitting position 🙂
Buildtak didn’t work with ABS for me, I managed to nearly destroy the surface after the third print. ABS temperature is too high for the Buildtak and causes to scare the surface rapidly. I didn’t try with PLA. But I have seen very good results at various 3D print shows.