Draft be gone!

After battling with ABS warping, I finally canned any dream of ever using my living room dining table again, and built a draft shield for the printrbot on it.

It's not the prettiest thing ever, but it gets the job done. Observe the printed filament hole in the cardboard. And with proper cleaning and hair spraying between prints, I finally seem to get bigger ABS prints that are not completely broken from warping. I'm still reluctant to call it without printing some more big parts, though.

On a side note, I ordered some glow in the dark PLA filament today, which should make for some interesting prints. I'm also still waiting for my supply of regular PLA to arrive. The small roll provided as a sample with the printer is running low, hence all the ABS whining. When I get the PLA I will probably play around with it for a while before touching ABS again.

ABS woes and printing landing gears

As I mentioned previously, my printer was having issues keeping the heated print bed at more than 92°C after relocating it to my living room. I fiddled around with a couple of ideas, and realized that the ATX PSU that came with the printer was only 400W.

After slaughtering an old PC, I salvaged a 650W PSU, and installed it in the printrbot simple metal. This helped dramatically with the temperature, and the printer now keeps around 100°C for the print bed.

The ABS plastic is still warping a bit for larger objects though, I'm suspecting that there is a draft along the floor. I intend to play around with various ways of shielding the print area during the weekend.

Anyhow, I promised a time lapse of a print. Here's an attempt at printing parts for a suspension landing gear I'm making for my Cessna 172. Notice how the right leg warps.