Printing A Lathe - Only 2 . . . 1 . . . 0 Plates To Go!

At the time of the post last night I had completed 3 of the 5 mini lathe print plates, and the printer was working on a fourth.  This morning I was greeted with a print bed full of good parts:

Plate 3 of 5 for Mini Lathe Print

And a closeup:

Plate 3 of 5 for Mini Lathe Print, Detail

What's more, these parts popped off of the glass relatively easily.  To prep the glass for the previous plate (where the parts had adhered almost too well) I had applied the diluted PVA mixture to the glass and used a fan to dry it, and the glass had set overnight before I printed.  

For the parts shown above (and a few prints since then), I applied the diluted PVA mixture to the glass while it was sitting on the heated build plate and warming up to the target 85 C or so that I've been using.  Basically as soon as the coating dried I started printing.

For a few prints now that strategy has resulted in parts that stuck well during printing but that also popped off pretty easily.  I may have ironed out the last wrinkle in my method for using diluted PVA to get PLA to adhere.

So that left only plate 4 of 5 to print.  I took about 15 minutes this morning to get it started before I headed to work, confident that using diluted PVA on the heated glass was going to perform once more, and it did!  Here are the prints from the last plate:

Plate 4 of 5 for Mini Lathe Print

You can see in the picture that there are some issues with the holes in the large part in the lower right corner. It looked like the printer had tried to bridge across the holes and failed.  Going back and looking at the G-code viewer in Pronterface, that is in fact what happened.  

For some reason, Slic3r put a single layer over the top of the holes on that surface of the one large part, and I did not catch that until after I saw the completed print.  Not a big issue in this case, but another reminder to review the sliced models and compare them to the .stl's or the geometry of the model you are printing from.

Failed Bridge on Top Layer of Large Part

Except for two pieces that I need to reprint for the 3-jaw chuck, I now have everything printed out for the mini lathe.  Next step is to assemble the various vitamins (nuts, threaded rod, smooth rod, bearings, screws, etc.) and get down to assembly.  Still lots of work to do, but I decided to take a break from the lathe for tonight's overnight print and make something that I could put on my desk at work and show off (hopefully :) ).  Right now the printer is working on this spiral cup from MakeALot over on Thingiverse:  http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6917

Spiral Cup from MakeALot via Thingiverse.com

So far so good on the first few layers, interested to see what greets me in the morning . . . 

D