New Toy: 3D Printer

[Adam Baker]

So my birthday was at the end of May, and my mom surprised me with a 3D Printer kit. I have to say that I've been having an absolute blast with this thing. It's definitely be very frustrating at times, but overall it's been very enjoyable working with it, and watching it make the parts.

The printer is an Anet A8, which is a clone of the Prussa Mk3 printer. It was a kit that I had to assemble myself, which took 18-20 hours since I took it very slowly, over the course of about a week.

My plan/goal for the future is to use this to make parts for my models, but I'm still a long way from that I think. I think I should be able to do it, but this will always be well below anything that I could get from Shapeways or similar, but I think it'll be more fun to make things myself.

Here are some pic's I took during the process.

A couple shots before I started unpacking everything, just to give an idea of what I had to start with. Frame is completely acrylic, looks to be about 1/4" thick.

Lots of hardware to deal with! Easiest way to deal w/ it was to buy some cheap ice cube trays to sort it all out. Big spender here, lol, 99 cents for 3 ice cube trays from Big Lots.

And then just some various assembly shots. I took pictures after every step, kinda chronicling my adventure, lol.

Frame assembled

Y axis/Print bed installed

X & Z axes installed.

Extruder/Print head installed

Wiring up the processor board. Stepper motors are plugged in down the left side of the board, power connections across the bottom, and then the limit switched for each axis are on the right side.

Included w/ the printer is a flash card with test files, and here are the first 2 prints I did.

Fist print is a token for Chinese Chess. The symbol on it apparently translates to General, which is supposed to be equivalent to a King in western chess.

The 2nd print is a figure of Baymax from the Big Hero 6 movie. I was about 1/3 of the way through the print when it popped loose from the print bed, effectively killing the print, but with it only being the second print, I was still pretty happy w/ the progress.

Now I'm working on various upgrades & improvements to the printer. It has a reputation for being less than reliable, and apparently they are actually known to catch fire due to possibly marginal wire sizing, and for how the power is routed through the main processor board to the print bed & the extruder.

 

[SA Dave]

cool toy mate :drinks

 

[Paulw]

I had fun with mine but because I did not have the room for it I gave it to a friend of mine that uses them (not the Prusa clones) at his employment making flight simulators. I burned out one power supply, bought an MD card extension and had all kinds of fun printing things off for my grand daughters. You probably have all the links to all the file sites so I wont bother you with those. I would suggest buying a load of heating elements and thermistors though, Adam.

 

[moon puppy]

Neato Adam!

 

[ausf]

Nice. You're already ahead of the game with the CNC type of Z axis gearing. I'm still making do with a typical hardware store threaded rod.

Too bad regarding the works, I'm using an Arduino with a Ramps board and no issues with it for the last three or four years.

I only use it for rough stuff, armatures and mold housings, I wasn't going to spend too much time trying to get perfect prints with a $300 kit. I was eyeballing a FromLabs resin printer, but honestly, I'm in no position to dedicate the time to it.

If you have consistent issue with the bed release, theres some great plastic surfaces you can tape to the heated bed as well as dropping the home of Z below the bed surface by a tiny bit, thereby squashing the first print layer, locking it in place. Even with all of that, you still may have a large top heavy print break loose unless you put down a nice big raft.

 

[Sherman 18]

That's cool!

:woohoo:

 

[Adam Baker]

Thankfully now that I've had a couple of months to play with it, and have used almost a full spool of filament, I've managed to work out most of the bugs and have started getting pretty consistent prints out of it.

For adhesion to the print bed, I started out early using blue painters tape, which I only tried for a couple of days b/c I had no luck at all with it, parts wouldn't stick at all. Probably a week or two after I got it, I got a piece of glass from the framing department at Micheals, and it's worked out great. After I got the glass, I started using Elmers glue sticks for adhesion, which worked out ok, but now I've started using hair spray. A friend suggested Aqua Net Extra Super Hold, and it works amazing. Spray it once and I can get several prints before having to reapply.

Right now my big thing is working on making an enclosure to hold & protect the printer.

Nice. You're already ahead of the game with the CNC type of Z axis gearing. I'm still making do with a typical hardware store threaded rod.

Too bad regarding the works, I'm using an Arduino with a Ramps board and no issues with it for the last three or four years.

I only use it for rough stuff, armatures and mold housings, I wasn't going to spend too much time trying to get perfect prints with a $300 kit. I was eyeballing a FromLabs resin printer, but honestly, I'm in no position to dedicate the time to it.

If you have consistent issue with the bed release, theres some great plastic surfaces you can tape to the heated bed as well as dropping the home of Z below the bed surface by a tiny bit, thereby squashing the first print layer, locking it in place. Even with all of that, you still may have a large top heavy print break loose unless you put down a nice big raft.

 

[jknaus]

Cool Beans. I would love to play with a 3d printer.

 

[Adam Baker]

Let me tell you, it has been an absolute blast to play around with, and I haven't even gotten real serious with it yet. Still working on figuring it out and trying to figure out how to improve the printer.

Cool Beans. I would love to play with a 3d printer.