So what shall I make this week...
How about gears? Gears are cool. How about gears that are already meshed, and printed as a single piece... something you couldn't do without additive manufacturing.
So I designed two simple gears, gave the teeth nice fillet and made a holder that will keep the gears in place. I then assembled them into a Solidworks assembly (see side bar). The crucial aspect is the clearance that is shown in the section view below.
My clearance was 0.1 mm between the gears and the gear holder. Once you have the assembly, its simply a matter of exporting it as an STL (remember to export them as a single file)
Printing time!
I tried printing it in the Sindoh first. The user interface for the proprietary software did not seem the most intiutive compared to Cura (although I admit it might jsut be that I'm more used to it).
Hit print, and 2 hrs later (you can see the printing sped up in the side bar)...
Ok so that's dissapointing.
As I was trying to rotate the gears, they didn't neatly shear off the little bits of plastic, but the entire gear ripped off. Clearly the gears and the holder had fused together to become one big part. Now I was curious to see how the Prusa might perform with the same file. I decided to give it a try and this is what I ended up with...
It was great! The supports came of easily and as I just rotated the gears the tiny bits of support between the gears and the holder neatly sheared off to give a pair of smooth spinning gears! Check out the video on the bar to the left! I'm curious to try playing around with the different settings and see if I can create the same product using the Sindoh printers.