3D Printing

So we have still not been able to fully repair the nozzle on the Ditto+. It seems to have been clogged by some hardened filament. This happened unexpectedly when we tried to change the filament in the printer. While we doing this routine task, some of the plastic in the nozzle got left behind unknown to us. When we tried to put the new roll of filament in, we found that it wouldn’t go into the nozzle all the way. After taking disassembling the entire nozzle mount and looking down the nozzle to see if the it was clear, we discovered to our dismay that it was not. We tried to clear it by melting out the hardened plastic inside the nozzle with a blow torch.

You can see in this picture that the wafering of the cube is pretty bad.

The other day we finally got the time to print test the nozzle after attempting to clear it and here are some pictures of the results. The pictures below are of the 10cm cubed cube that we printed. It seems that the printer wasn’t printing at a constant extrusion rate, or the print bed was to high which could be the reason for the wafering effect.

An uncanny resemblance to a wafer cookie.

Since we this test was just after we cleared the nozzle, we believe that it is the former and has something to do with a variable extrusion rate from the nozzle. The reason for this variable extrusion rate could be that one of the pieces inside the nozzle that is supposed to be smooth, was damaged somehow and is no longer smooth. We plan to try to melt any extra plastic out again using the blowtorch technique, to see it there is any unwanted filament still in there just to be sure.

Since we aren’t too optimistic that blow torching it again will fix the problem, we have ordered a new nozzle for the printer. The new extruder that we ordered is somewhat smaller than the one we currently have so some adjustments need to be made to the nozzle mount.

For Science and Tech we had the task of researching and designing a tiny home. A tiny home is a really small house, usually for one or two people to live in. The main benefits of a tiny home is the low price in comparison to a regular house, because they are smaller. They can vary in price depending on their size, but from what we have seen in our research they tend to be quite cheap.

Before we designed our tiny home, our group (the two of us) decided that we would print out our tiny home. In order to make this happen, we did the research on CADs (Computer Aided Design) and planned it out on paper. We then went on to populate it with furniture and estimate the costs. First we designed the general structure of our building, then put in the furniture (which looks like a bunch of rectangular prisms). We made sure that when we designed it digitally, we used a CAD that we knew we would save in a file type that would be compatible with our slicer.

The CAD we decided to use was FreeCAD, because it was free and open source, but mainly because it was free. Since we aren’t exactly CAD experts our design was pretty basic. As you can see in the picture below (If you use your imagination you might be able to see the fridge and some cabinets).

After a few hours of work between each of us, we finished our design. Once that was taken care of we saved it as a mesh file so that we could slice it. After slicing our design and scaling it down to a reasonable size so that it would fit on the print bed, we ended up printing it in PLA on the Ditto+. It took somewhere between 30mintues to an hour to print and turned out pretty well.

After inspecting the print, I was surprised to see how well the arch above the doorway worked out. Neither of us had even thought about the possibility of it being a problem until we saw that it had worked. That’s a quick summary of our process for our tiny home design.

Category Archives: Design

Nozzle Clog Update

Tiny Home Design