3D Printing with materials other than PLA/ABS

What are tax refunds for, if not to buy a bunch of spools of exotic filaments! More fun and exciting than the typical colored range of PLA I have played with so far, “exotic” filaments have come to refer to anything that goes through your FDM printer that isn’t pure ABS or PLA. They come in two categories: PLA filled with particles of something else, like the bronzeFill I played with previously, or some other type of thermoplastic entirely. It takes some time and experimentation to find the temps that new thermoplastics print at, what surfaces they adhere to, how much cooling they like, among other factors. Furthermore, every 3D printer is a special snowflake, so I’ll post here the settings that worked for me, but they may not work exactly as listed for you.

If you’re in the Washington, DC area, I’ll have models made all of these filaments on display at the NoVa Mini Maker Faire on March 15. Come take a look!

Odd X-axis Slippage – Problem and Solution

Classic belt slippage, courtesy of /u/Cow_Bell

You may already be familiar with the problem of belt slippage on 3D printers. If your belts are too loose, or are worn, or maybe your motor doesn’t get enough current, you’ll start skipping steps. Then you end up with prints that go all slantyways across the offending axis, and that makes for not very useful prints. Belt wear and slippage used to be a recurring problem with the old pulley-and-line belts used in the first instar of my Printrbot Simple, but is less of a problem (but still sometimes a problem!) with the G2 timing belts that are now used.

NoVa Mini Maker Faire!

Printing a Gengar in purple glow-in-the-dark PLA.

The NoVa Mini Maker Faire is on Sunday, March 15 at South Lakes High School in Reston, VA. The Little Printer That Could will be making an appearance!

I’m hosting a booth called 3D Printing Toys and Games, since that’s mostly what I do with the printer. Expect to see a fair amount of miniature giant robots, evil space monsters, and D&D terrain. I’m also going to print out some of dutchmogul‘s stuff, because his stuff is awesome, he is awesome, and he should feel awesome.