Printing with Inconsistent Filament
Filament
For a while I have been printing with filament that has some good tolerances. Parts always come out great when printing with good filament. But I wanted to know what happens when the filament is not as good. I turned up the heat while extruding some ABS filament to make some bubbles, the filament as shown is the filament that we printed with.
As you can see, there are many air bubbles and the diameter is way off. The printrbot uses a 3mm filament. The filament that I was printing with is approximately 2.28mm in diameter. Once the printer was set up to print, I had no problems with making the parts. The part on the left was with printed with the bad, bubbly filament. There were no differences in the quality of the part from using the ugly filament. I suspect this is because when the filament is melted it allows for the bubbles to rise up and out of the extruder leaving the plastic to fill the void. Now for the smaller size filament, I don’t think it causes a problem because when the filament is pushed in it fills the extruder chamber making it act like normal, 3mm size filament. I will be doing some more test on this topic.
Bases
We have all of our bases from our plasma cutter. Now we need to grind the metal slag off and sand the metal to prep for paint. We will be painting the bases with primer and a semi-gloss paint.
MrConcerned
whatever you do…don’t look the dog in the eyes..!!!!