For Sale: 3d prints

[donkey]

well guys, as you probably know I gots me a 3d printer.
so I am offering a 3d print or 2 for anyone willing to pay.... at the moment the prints will be slow but I am needing someone to help me out with getting the hang of the printer.
cost price will be for print and postage.

 

[Mongrel Shark]

As some of you may already know. I have been working with Donkey on this 3d printing caper for a while now.

Attached are some images of some of the prints in black ABS using a 1.0mm (really fat) nozzle.
This nozzle gives a very strong finish at the cost of fine detail. The layer bonding is really strong in these prints.
Nearly broke my old cast iron meat grinder crushing up some failed calibration cubes...

All the pictured prints are in 0.2mm layers, except the thumb wheel and the small dragon tablet/phone holder/stand thingy. These where both printed in 0.1mm layers.

The bookmarks are 1.5mm thick (also printed in 0.1mm layers) and are very felxable.

I am still improving print quality daily. So these should be considered worst case examples.

This printer is out of action for a few days while a new hotend is in the post. Once that is fitted I will print up an example project box I have designed in CAD.

We also have ABS in Red, Light Blue, Dark Blue, white, natural (yellow/rubber/latex colour) and some really bright, almost fluro orange. ABS can be painted with the right paint.

The parts in the pictures are all unfinished. ie I could clean them up a lot with a sand and/or an acetone wipe.

I'll update this thread with some hand finished pics of the same prints for comparison. As well as some finer prints with the new 0.4mm nozzle once its running again.

As far as accuracy goes. No problems getting sub millimetre accuracy. I do like to make screw holes etc a touch small though. They are easy to enlarge with a drill, self tapper, or hot poker, and unusable if too big... Same for nut/bolt head recesses. The nut in the thumb-wheel was a very tight fit. I had to give it a poke with a soldering iron to get it seated right. But its not coming out by accident now... The XYZ calibration cubes where set at 20mm and measured 20.01 on my calipers.

 

[donkey]

as a side note shark and I are getting pretty adept at freecad. we can make custom boxes for project housing, this one is due for print soon as I get my PC to freaking work.
later we will look at meshes and see the viability of making more complex items like a PCB cnc, resin printer, SLS printer, CNC machine amongst some top secret items that we have kept to ourselves for now.
Printing is getting easier but Shark and I are looking at a 2fold scheme through ep
1st we want to help out those that want to have a custom design printed
2nd we want feedback on the parts, delivery etc so we can actually give up some day jobs and get some time to help ourselves.

your help is appreciated as always and we are looking at making a website soon but for the interim we want some small jobs from people to get us started.

oh also print sizes are currently limited to 20cm x20cm x 18cm so don't ask for for a 1:! tank for example.

the only limitations Shark and I have is that we live in Australia so items printed cannot break the laws here, and also its filament feeder so some items may print differently to how you think so give us the STL files as opposed to gcode so we can fully review it before print and get the best result

 

[Mongrel Shark]

Also here is a print in PLA from the finer printer. Zoom right in to see the fine detail and a few imperfections that are easily fixed with sandpaper in 20 seconds.



This was a test run for a headlight bracket to go on the forks of my e-bike. We did it in PLA with 20% infill and a thick layer height (0.4mm) to reduce print time (still took over 4 hours) just to see if it fits right, which it does. But I found its probably strong enough mostly hollow, in PLA.. So now I'm working on a smaller lighter model I can do in ABS. As soon as the new parts arrive I should be able to get this kind of detail on the home made printer too.

There is a bit of C-channel I got from some appliance frame in the background of the pics. That goes in the slot (almost, I CADed the slot too small) and gives me something to bolt my headlights too. (Still undecided on exact deadlights. The bike has a 10ah 48v li-ion so maybe some 100W LED's... Anyone know if there is a legal max limit for lights on a pedestrian vehicle in Australia? I'm hearing roomers of a measly 3k lumens per side for cars on high beam.)


As you can see the finer nozzle gives a much finer detailed print. Its still very strong. I'd need a hammer, very large pliers or the large bench vice to break it. These finer detailed prints do take longer though. Especially if lots of infill is required. We are not wanting to charge forum members for our time in this introductory period, but it is something to consider when planning a print. If you want a 200x200x180 solid cube in 0.1mm layers. We are going to either say no, or charge enough to buy a few cases of whisky. Because a print that big would take at least a week.

One advantage to the finer detailed but longer print time is the nuts dropped in with some light-moderate hand pressure. As there is a slight overhang of 1.75mm to retain a corner of each nut under the arch, the nuts are retained securely while still being easy to replace if one fails. The inner arc radius came out perfectly at the 36.75mm diameter I CADed it to, giving it a very firm spring-fit on my 37mm forks. So we can get finer tolerances with less hand finishing work, at the cost of taking longer to print. Obviously the longer print time needs to be reflected in our business model. Which is why we want a few "Mates Rates Jobs" to help us fine tune our exact pricing model. So we are offering at cost printing for forum members for the next month or two. We hope to offer continued discount to forum members as we wouldn't be doing any of this if not for this forum!

And yes. CNC PCB's will be coming soon. For those that want a small number of boards at a decent price. Its a great option for prototyping and one off designs. Although there is already a lot of interest in this service, so I may have to make 2... I'm aiming for 10 micron traces. Its a big ask. I'll have to make one to see how much I can get the mechanical tolerances down. Fairly confident I can get significantly better than 500 micron traces. So somewhere in the 10-500 micron wide trace ballpark... Time frame on this is not set in stone yet. I'd like to start on the CNC (I have a frame and most of the parts) in the next week and finish it in a few days, but thats probably not going to happen... 2-3 months before we can offer high precision pcb's is probably more realistic.