Homemade 3d printer HM3DP

Another test

2011-08-09T17:27:00.000-07:00

Got the P.S fixed, added a opto switch to the cycle start and a new cartridge. Set it up with the same old dental plaster and got a nice print out. Dimension is about right at +- 0.1mm. the part is about 31mm wide x 90mm long x 10mm tall. The original cartridge ink seams to hold well the part definition when printing and soaking the plaster enough to give it a good strength to handle it and at same time not bleading out of the contour. It gets much better after curing it in the oven then infiltrate it with cyano but still not close to the zcorp material strength

Next step is to build a depowdering station,and run more tests.

Camera shots makes it looks worst then it really is.

Print Tests

2010-10-09T13:37:00.000-07:00

Some parts printed to check how good it prints.

The dino took about 2 hours per side to be printed then glued together, it´s about 80mm tall,

the statue was printed in one shot and took about 4 hours and it´s about 120mm tall,it shines becouse of flash reflection on Super glue infiltration needed to increase parts strength .There is also a 1/5 scale R/C gas bike rear arm that´s part of another design I´m working on.

Any feature that´s smaller then 1mm will not hold together when it´s in the green state and it´s hard to get out of the build bin without breaking it apart, except when it´s short like the dino´s teeth.

All the parts was carefully cleaned prior to seal it with cyano using a very low pressure air gun to not break any of the small details.

A new affordable 3d printer?

2010-09-29T16:02:00.000-07:00

I´ve found this on you tube, It´s called BFB 3000 Panther, it´s made by Bitsfrombytes.

it´s based on the open source reprap fdm development.The price is about 4k usd assembled.

I´ve read that it´s about 0.1mm accurate, still I would like to know how good it is.

Actually, after a better reading on the specs, it says 1% accuracy on x and y depending on the size being printed,so, it will be 0.1mm accurate on a 10mm square part and about 1mm off on a 100mm square parts, Im wondering if the cad drawing could be scaled on x and y to compensate for the 1%.

The best thing is, there is no maintenance contract .

If anyone has one, I would like to know how well it prints.

Read this

2010-09-29T09:22:00.000-07:00

This is my attempt to make a homemade 3d printer out of cheap materials, if you build something cheap you should not expect that it will work as good as a well built one.
I´ve chosen the cheap way mainly to see if it would work. The concept works, it prints,but becouse the way it was built I can not get into the final stages of it, that is , checking for accuracy of the printed models.The last part printed on it was about 1mm bigger than the cad drawing becouse there was to much water being printed and it was bleading out of the parts perimeter. Another thing is I can not make the building chamber to go up/down straight becouse the way I´ve built the building chamber thus shifting the layers being printed side to side and that also have a impact on accuracy.It works ok if I want to print something that does not need accuracy like a statue.
Now, this is a home made project, it was done a limited budget. It was built on my spare time with parts I had laying around and a lot of research on the net about how it works . Paulo ,a friend of mine developed the software to slice the stl models and send it to the printer to be printed in sequence.
The dust thing I´m using is dental plaster with a tad of Pva powder mix to it. Still need to try other mix to see how well they work, and just plain distilled water /ink on the cartridge.
The printer used was a Lexmark Z12 desktop printer.
So far the only company that I´ve got help from is MCS ELECTRONICS makers of bascom, this is the software I use to program the atmel microprocessor that manages the electronic side of the printer, it works as a basic language programer making it easyer to learn than C+ or any other programming language.there is link on the right of this page to them, the demo version works fine to program the atmel at90s2313 chip.
If you have questions about it, please join the yahoo tech group (there is link to it on the right side of this page) lot´s of people there that can help, and there is my folder(fogassa´s folder)on it with some more information on how it works and some more pictures.
I´ll update this as my free time permits.

I´m back

2010-09-29T00:40:00.000-07:00

Found a cd with some pictures of the build on it.