TOPIC:

Hello again my TamiyaBase family, Sorry I havent been about for a while. my head hasnt been in the right place which gives me no interest in anything at the moment but i am trying to get back to normal.  Read an email today which said there was a new post so thought id pop in. 

I've had my printer for just over 12 months. Its a Flashforge Creator Pro, Enclosed, 2 heads and heated bed. Printed quite a bit on it and one of the heads will not heat up ( problem on the motherboard) but I just use the other one. 

Learned a bit of Fusion360 and TinkerCad which has helped me design and print a few parts for my tamiya's a complete body for my Big Bear and a lot of parts for my first ever Crawler. As some of you know I did some lunchbox wheels for myself and FLo a while ago which work great. Heres some of the things ive printed and designed.


Lunchy wheels that i Did for me and Flo


Ford Econoline body for Lunchy#3 (HIPS) Got to reprint though as its slightly too small. This can wait for a while. 


Big Bear body before it was bolted and glues together (PETG) didnt have much luck with the petg though, found it hard to get a good print despite using a heated box for the filament. This came out ok though.


A Mach5 replica wheel designed my me in Fusion360 as a beadlock rim for the crawler. Took a while to get it right but they are now printed in green and fitted to the crawler.


A couple of pics of the crawler, apart from the chassis, running gear, gearbox, shocks axles and tyres everything else has been 3d printed from either files on Thingiverse or designed myself. I designed the spur cover and electronics plate in tinkercad. All the new stuff is in green not black as I had a whole roll of green and not much of black or white, I was lazy and didnt want to risk a blockage so left green in the printer. 





Frankenhopper is built and working, just needs paint


I have done more bits but didnt take pictures and theres other stuff thats not RC related so havent shown them.

Getting there slowly though. 
Its good to be back and pposting a few pics.
 

Very nice.

Suggestion for the green color. Print a Tractor body for it, then the color matches perfectly.

Still a big thanks to you Lee. Hotwheels rims are waiting new tires. But they are awesome and very solid. 

Lemsko, I will paint them at some point so it doesnt matter what colour they are.  White looks good and so does black but I need to get some new rolls before I will print replacements.  Do you mean a Tractor like on a farm or a truck tractor unit    Good to know the wheels are still ok Flo.  It was a pleasure to do them for you. 
 

Great projects.

I find the PETG I've printed, 220c seems to work very well on the rolls I've printed so far.
(Only been printing PETG)

Nice projects...
PETG issue is mainly with frist layer adhesion : you need to have the right temp, level and bed temp. My first prints were perfects. And then it became difficult... But I understood too late the issue was not coming from the filament but from intermitent BL Touch connection issues making the level matrix inacurate. Since I figured out the issue, I made replace the connectors on the cable by new ones which I solder rather thn just press on the wires. No more leveling issue, and very much less printing issue. I clean the glass bed before printing with Acetone and it just works as long as I properly level the printer when starting it...
 

Hi Richard, i dont now if i just had some bad filament. It printed ok when it came out of the sealed bag but had some issues with stringing and moisture once it had been out in the air for a day or two and then id get a blockage.I know it soakes up moisture but I had it in a heated box.  It was a brand calle Fibrology which is supposed to be really good but mine wasnt. Maybe if i tried another brand but im not sure I want to risk it. The HIPS wasnt too bad I didnt have too much trouble with it. 

Marc, I didnt think of levelling the bed each time, mine is manual leveling though. Didnt have any adhesion issues or warping, just some stringing which wasnt really an issue, moisture mmade some layers go bad and blockages mainly. 
It works great with pla. I may just try another brand of petg and see what happens. 

Stringy mens moisture in most cases.
I've yet to get that as I only buy Hydrofob filaments (won't take moisture) which I think has helped a lot.
Non of my filaments is enclosed (3 rolls) and to this date I have not needed to heat them up to get rid of the moisture.

So far I've only purchased  Clas Ohlson (swedish brand) filament which I think is rebranded Flashforge filaments as they only sell Flashforge machines, like the one I have.
The only other roll I have from a different brand is PrimaSelect from PrimaCreator. That is also Hydrofob.
One of the reasons I won't print PLA as most is not Hydrofob. And most of my prints need to be strong, hence I choose PETG.

Stringy doesn't mean moisture... It may simply due to retractation issue. My printer is not enclosed, and I got a lot of stringy prints at some point, even with the dryer being religiously started 6 hours before starting a print. I started to suspect retractation issues... And that was right. When I reinstalled Cura on my new laptop, it was the moment to question myself : the issue started to appear when moving to Cura 5 from 4. I installed 5 but did restart with clean default settings, and issues disappeared right way, except for one filament roll. On that one, sometime i would have issue of extrusion, sometimes issues with the retractation. Got the roll out, and measure the diameter of the filament in some points and found it out of tolerance... between 1.65 and 1.85 mm. Filament went to the bin.

In short :
- when changing version of slicer, reset to default settings.
- temp tower when new filament to understand where it works best (last versions of Cura have plugins to generate the stl and associated gcode). If you can't get the tower right with the default settings, and the filament temp range indicated on the roll, there is another issue...

jord001 wrote:

 Do you mean a Tractor like on a farm or a truck tractor unit  

 

Yep thats what i meant. Porsche made nice tractors in the past and i heard Lamborghini too.