Planetary Gears Print

A forum member suggested using a fan and setting the temperature lower to improve the 50 mm tower print, and both methods yielded improved results.  I still don't have a good way to mount a fan and properly duct the airflow, I was just holding it in my hand and directing it toward the print.

I had a lot of trouble getting good adhesion on the first layer of the prints this afternoon.  I'm printing with PLA and had been getting decent performance from blue painter's tape over a piece of glass (not heated), but it took me a while today to get things to stick well, and I ended up wasting a lot of time on that.  In the end, I think it was a matter of getting the correct Z-axis homing position so that the first layer got smushed onto the tape.

Once the first layer was sticking again and I had completed a second 50 mm tower, I was getting tired of just printing calibration objects.  So I found these planetary gears on Thingiverse: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:23030

I knew it was ambitious, but I decided to print them out, and here is a movie of my MendelMax 1.5 in action:

I just sat there for minutes staring at the machine while it ripped back and forth printing out gears, nuts, screws, and knurled (yes, knurled) pieces :) .  Here are the parts after they were done (and a few strings were trimmed off--not many though, thankfully).

A couple of pieces that were taller and had a smaller base toppled over during the print, leaving me a few pieces short on assembly:

But hey, you're not much of an engineer if you can't adapt to adversity, so I was able to grab a M8 bolt and finish the assembly.

At this point I feel like the printer is able to print well enough to make useful, functioning components.  Time to bone up on some of the open source CAD software out there and start designing my own parts to print.  I say open source because even though I have several years of ProE and NX/Unigraphics experience I do not want to spare several months of my salary to buy a license for either one :)

Of course, there is Google Sketchup with a .stl export plugin . . .

D