Patents, What a mess. I'm a contract design guy. People pay me to build prototypes of electrical, mechanical, optical things. As such I have been around patents quite a bit and the conclusion I've come to is that they are rarely worth it for the little guy. The patent system is broken and has been f...

I was wondering the same thing. I ended up with two of those silicone impregnated fiberglass baking mats by accident (long story). I'm not much of a cook. I know my food is done when the fire alarm goes off I will cut one up and give it a try this weekend.

chad

That's a really odd failure considering that during normal operation there is no lateral stress on that shaft. Also the stepper doesn't have anywhere enough torque to twist that off. It must be some sort of metallurgical anomaly from when the stock was forged prior to machining. Crazy, that's a new ...

I have been playing with this. What I did is set the price per kg of filament to $1000 in s3d.
so this part:
Build time: 1 hour 45 minutes
Filament length: 7182.5 mm
Plastic weight: 21.59 g (0.05 lb)
Material cost: $21.59

You can obviously scale this up and down at will.

Just a thought...

chad

Hi guys, This has been an interesting topic. I also have struggled with blobs at times. Aside from all of the great analysis already discussed I found that doubling my retraction speed from 2000 to 4000 helped me quite a bit. Just one other value that you might want to try tweaking and see if it hel...

Congrats on the nice PR. Looks like your back-log is going to get a little bigger!

chad

One trick I use to help a little is to remove the lasercut fan grills. Having the blades that close to the grill form the basis of a chopper siren. Here is a quick you tube video I found. http://youtu.be/QczRYEd6kfw I used a pair of dikes to cut out the plastic for the power supply fan as well. It d...

Thanks for the link. I looked at that guy and it is a neat idea but we are already much better using steppers. Look at the twisted vase, yuck. arrg, lost the post.... There are a couple of problems with the path they chose. First, Backlash. This is the enemy of ALL mechanical systems. This is displa...

I've done some experimenting here too. Long term stability isn't going to be 6061 but if you don't mind tweaking a little more should work for test stuff. Hell of a lot cheaper than thor for proving out ideas. First pic you can see some flexure mounts that I machined (red) and printed. (upper right ...

Did you get the puck one or the bigger ones? I bought the puck one a long time ago and couldn't get used to it. It's too light, I ended up moving it around too much.
I also have many years of muscle memory in my cad program spinning things around with my mouse. Just couldn't rewire my brain

chad