Fun with bronzeFill

Expensive filament, cheap printer.

bronzeFill is a new filament developed by ColorFabb, a lovely manufacturer of high-end filaments in The Netherlands*. bronzeFill is a PLA filament that has been mixed liberally with bronze dust. That means it melts at PLA temps (190-220C) instead of bronze temps (~950C). It also means that the end result that comes out of your printer can be, with a little post-processing, very metal-like in appearance.

It’s a softer filament and it’s a bit oozy compared to other PLA, but not so oozy that I have needed to adjust my retraction settings. I’m going to sand the shit out of whatever I print it in, so a bit of stringing is not the end of the world.

Using 3D Printed models in pen-and-paper RPGs or Tabletop Wargames

A 3D printer can be an absolutely fantastic tool for people who do a lot of traditional gaming. By traditional games, I mean pen-and-paper Role Playing Games (RPG) like Dungeons & Dragons, or wargames like Warhammer 40k. While the quality of a 3D printed mini using a cheap fused filament printer like mine doesn’t come anywhere near the quality of a sculpted and injected molded model, there is still a lot you can do.

For the most part, our PC minis are normal, traditionally manufactured minis. We print set dressing, special items, or monsters; things that either can’t be had exactly the way we want them from existing stores, or things that are simple enough that we can model and print them ourselves. The first example is set dressing and terrain.

When Printrboards Overheat

When I got a warranty replacement Printrboard last year, the new board worked. That was better than the one it replaced, but it exhibited a strange failure: sometimes it would soft-reset in the middle of a print, typically after an hour in. By “soft reset” I mean that it would stop printing and that Repetier-Host would report “Connection Closed,” but the fan and the hot end would remain on. So, the hot end would remain poised a fraction of a millimeter over plastic at 200C until I found it. That’s something of a fire hazard, so my printer was put on no-unattended-prints until I figured this out. Generally, when power is cut to the printrboard, from a power outage or a reset, the hot end turns off, so this was a puzzle.

Printrbot Simple Upgrade Part III: Oh, I totally did that wrong.

Part I: Upgrading a Printrbot Simple 2013 to a Simple Maker’s Edition (1405) using the Maker’s Upgrade Kit
Part II: The Upgradening

When we last left our heroes, I had a mostly-functioning Printrbot Simple Maker’s Edition v1405 on my desk. I say mostly because the following issues had cropped up:

• Heat bed thermistor not working
• Two extra parts
• Fan doesn’t turn on
• Neither X nor Y axis would home
• Not enough room under X axis carriage for heat bed
• Whole X axis carriage is wobbly and comes apart with a stiff breeze

Printrbot Simple Upgrade Part II: The Upgradening

Part I: Upgrading a Printrbot Simple 2013 to a 1405 Maker’s Edition using the Upgrade Kit
Part III: Oh, I totally did that wrong.

I got my missing parts in the mail, and assembled the rest of the printer. I was super excited, and stayed up rather late working on it, although I did finish. I ran into one problem during assembly, and I have a couple of structural quibbles about the design, particularly around adding a heat bed.

Upgrading a Printrbot Simple 2013 to a Simple Maker’s Edition (1405) using the Maker’s Upgrade Kit

Printrbot in pieces…

The Printrbot Simple Upgrade Kit is designed to upgrade a Printrbot Simple Maker’s Edition (1401) to the newest version (1405).

I picked up this kit so that I could upgrade my 2013 Simple, but a 2013 is not quite a 1401, so my life is a little more complicated.

3D Printed Things: Gallery 1

Danger Will Robinson: Heated Bed and Induction Probe Interference

I installed my induction probe, and everything was magical.

Then I installed the heat bed, and things were more magical.

Then the auto leveling started getting weird.

Adventures with Heated Beds

I wanted a heated bed for my 3D Printer. Because I wanted one. That’s really the extent of my justification.

I found an aftermarket supplier (there are now several) that made PCB Heat Beds in the right size (6″x4.5″) and bought it. I also had to buy a thermistor, which is a thermometer/resistor; this has a bead that measures temperature and provides resistance accordingly. It got taped to the bottom of the heat bed with electrical tape.

Auto-leveling: For fun and profit awesome

A probe for auto bed leveling is the single best $7 I have spent on my printer. Seriously. A cheap probe and some free firmware fix some huge problems.

My probe, installed and functioning. Look at that smooth first layer!

Auto-leveling is something of a misnomer. It doesn’t not actually matter how level your bed is (levelness being defined as the plane of the bed perpendicular to the force of gravity). What really matters is how parallel the motion of the print carriage is to the bed. If your print carriage was completely level in its motion, than these two things would be the same, but they are often just slightly different… slightly enough to be a problem.