Leftover Printer Projects.

So I found a few pictures from my tech 2 class from last school year.  Thought I posted them already but apparently not, so here they are.

I gave them a pretty simple set of directions:  Design something in Sketchup with at least 3 different parts, one of which must "move".  I had several kids try and do cases for phones and ipods, but they proved a little to detail rich for most of them.  Here are a couple that I managed to take pics of before they left for the year.

Airplane.  Printed in several different pieces then assembled with glue.  The propeller spins!





Ipod charging stand.  No moving parts, but very functional!



 

Lego guy and a robot.The one on the right has moving arms.



Turntable.  Tried printing rollers for it but ended up using ball bearings.



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And a couple of pics while on the printer.


 


 

There were several others, but I didn't get a chance to take pictures of them.  Had a couple of R/C winches and a really cool bicycle with spinning wheels and a working set of handlebars.  I'd like to reprint that one for my classroom sometime.

Just for fun, a few from today.  Making an "Occupied" sign for the handicapped bathrooms at school.  Cranked up the speed, man is that thing fast!




 
 

There you go.  I'm sure we'll have plenty of projects to post in the coming months!

Printer prep. Got 300 kids that want to play with it this year!

Dug my MM 2.0 out of the closet and got it set up and running in anticipation of 300 new students that want to try it out this year...

'Course, had to do a test run...









Printer ran great, although my design needs some tweaking to prevent warpage.

Thought I needed to give the printer a workout, so I found a broken bit of plastic I needed repaired.

I've got Pelican cases on my KTM, and one of the latches lost some teeth. The release would still catch and sort of hold it on, but I didn't want my lunch flying out on the way to school.

Gettin the dang thing apart proved to be a chore... Had to drill a hole to get to the back side of the pin so I could punch it out.



Pin on its way out:



Viola! Latch removed. You can sort of see where the broken teeth are- the bottom piece where it sticks down is supposed to have a hook on it.



Sketchup to the rescue.



Took me about 5 attempts before I got one that fit nicely and pulled the door shut tight enough.

Gettin a print ready:



One of the early attempts:





Heres the one I'm currently "testing". It was printed with only 10% infill, so I don't think it will hold up long. We'll see. Already found a few minor changes I want to make, but here it is as printed:



Cut and ready to fit:



Assembled:



Installed.



So here is the before:



and the after:



Had some issues with the printer this time. Think I've had problems with my control board from day one (pretty sure its one of the first RUMBA boards- every now and then I get a random issue where after every move, it pauses for about a second.  Think I found a workaround today though). If I have any money left over in the school budget I might just spring for a new one to rule that out.

Also going to start experimenting with settings (jerk, in particular) to see if I can get better quality and higher speeds.

One other thing (okay, 2) that I want to learn more about is Bridging and "moving part" prints.  Both I can attempt with this model-  could do 2 bridges and have only 2 pieces printed instead of 3, and print them in place.  The harder one would be to print bridged, with pins in the holes so I didn't have to use metal.  Probably too weak for real life application, but it would be pretty neat to print the part, pull it off and have a moving part with out any other assembly!

Mendelmax 2.0- Updated to the "Birdstruder"

I downloaded and printed my first "thingy" from thingiverse the other day- the "birdstruder".  Noticed my extruder idler was cracking!



It was still working, but occasionally the filament would slip and the print would skip.  Here's where thingiverse comes in- downloaded and printed this little gizmo to replace the Maker Gear plastruder.  The new one is even quick change capable!

Parts freshly printed:
 


Assembly (you can probably see why its called the birdstruder):



Latched,



Open:



Installed, tested, and working!



Pretty happy with it so far, seems to be much better designed and I love the tool-less filament change now. Took a tad bit of dremel-ing to get things to fit perfect but overall it was pretty darn close.Had to buy 2 longer screws and nuts to go with them, for a grand total of something like 78 cents.  Can't argue with that!

Tech 2 has been working on their "big" projects.  Went back and forth with a few different ideas of what they could do but in the end here's what we decided. 

I gave them some real basic guidelines- must have at least 3 different parts, one of which must "move". So far we have 3 Ipone / Ipod cases, a pair of glasses, a boat anchor and winch, 2 lego people, a folding lawn chair, and an airplane. This oughta be interesting...  Hoping to start a batch printing tomorrow, because we've only got a week and a half of school left!!!

Mendelmax 2.0- First batch of Student Projects!

Finally got around to finishing up the wheels for the student cars.  Think they turned out pretty nice!

Started out just running 4 at a time but got to where I did 8 in one fell swoop.







4 down, 33 to go.

Printed wheels of in batches of 100.  Looks like I finally got my bed pretty darn level.



Pile of wheels and my sample with 'em glued on.



And the finished products!













Some of them followed the instructions great, a few didn't and their wheels didn't fit in the wheel wells... Mostly they turned out pretty good! 

My Tech 2 class (Grade 8) has been playing with the printer this week, here are a couple of their "practice" prints.





They drew them up, exported the .stl, repaired it in Netfabb, and a few of them played a bit with Repetier. Couldn't get it to install on all of the computers though so we loaded them all in one file to generate the code.


We started on their big projects- have a couple students attempt ipod / iphone cases, one pair of glasses, an airplane, a couple of "lego" people, a trailer jack (?!?!?), a boat anchor and winch...  The things kids come up with.  Should be fun!