world maker faire NY who is goin...

[sprior]

We're still in denial about driving to Queens today, but it looks like we're going. If anyone suggests a place to meet this afternoon I'll try to be there.

[jimc]

Well i just got home from walking around all day. Unfortunately i didnt get to meet up with anyone from here but i did track down the s3d guys. Chatted with them for awhile. Clayton had a nice m2 dual running. Only one extruder was going though since he said he just got it and hasnt had a chance to mess with dual prints in it yet. Ricks dual setup is very nice. The hotends are super tiny. Very compact. I like it for sure. I also talked to jetguy a bit, if any of you mnow him. He had a massive 4x4x4' printer he built there. Crazy machine but i dont know what you would really print with it due to the time it takes to print something super large like that. Pete and one of the other guys from madesolid were there. They flew out from cali and had a booth so i chatted with them for a bit. They are coming out with a new filament soon.All in all it was a good show. Lots of stuff for sure. In the way of printers though there was really nothing earth shattering there.

[sprior]

Just got home as well. I saw the S3D booth, but just before that I wandered into a booth right across from them selling a plastic build plate sheet, asked them if they had a size to fit the MakerGear M2 I didn't expect them to know about and then suddenly realized that the printer they were using in the booth was in fact a V3B M2 - duh on my part. I bought one of those sheets for the "what the heck" price of $12.50. I told the S3D folks that we S3D/M2 dual extruder fans were starting to bail on them for Cura's dual extruder features and while they promised they're working on things, there was no timeframe and no beta test program.

If you go into the museum itself there is a lot of even specific stuff including a HUGE delta printer.

I really wanted to buy an electronics kit or two there, but since I already have an Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and Beaglebone Black there were SO many choices I got overwhelmed and ended up just buying a book.

[Tim]

Likewise, back from a full day at the Faire, and sorry I couldn't meet up with anyone in this group. I was going to check in last night, but I didn't get into the hotel until late night, so didn't have a good chance to check up on the forum.

I also talked to the S3D guys, and also told them that they were losing ground to Cura in the dual extruder department. They said they were well aware of that, and had some hacks in place as a temporary measure, but they're hoping to have a more integrated solution for dual extruders in their next big update. They are aiming for the end of the year, so just a few months.

Besides the gigantic 4x4x4 foot printer (with which they had made a vase that was big enough to plant a tree in!), there were a number (a large number) of new 3D printer designs. Still, none as solidly built as the M2. There was a nice one called the gCreator gMax, which was making surprisingly good stuff for being a standard-issue frame. They had put a lot of design effort into their extruder assembly, parts of which were printed with carbon fiber filament (interesting, but no match for MakerGear's newest all-metal mounts). But they had a lot of things printed in interesting materials that I've heard about but haven't got my hands on before, like bronze filament (with 70 or 80% bronze powder; that stuff is surprisingly heavy when printed!), wood filament, etc.

I talked to the paste extruder guys, too, who were situated back near the drone combat arena and not in the "3D printer village". They were attempting to print something in wasabi when I dropped by! Interesting to watch the setup and watch it in action. I still think the price tag ($300 was their special offer for Maker Faire weekend) is a bit high for what is basically a syringe and a motor to drive it. But they passed around a tray of the show-and-tell objects they had on their website and in their videos, including things printed in silicone, which is way more flexible than ninjaflex.

Shapeways was there and had a lot of really cool printed objects for show-and-tell. Oh, what you can do with a million dollar printer!

Got to see the FormLabs printer in action, also a kick to watch in action.

I would have probably spent all day around the 3D printers if my kids hadn't dragged me off to see drone battles and other stuff.

[sprior]

I'm sorry I didn't see the BronzeFill sample - I'm really curious about that stuff.

[jimc]

Yeah i saw the bronzefill. Matt had it at the printed solid boith. He was right next to s3d. I had emailed him prior to the show and had him bring along an e3dv6 for me. Im printing my mount and duct for it now. The bronzefill looked pretty cool. Just a grey brown but when its polished it looks neat.

[Tim]

One intesting tidbit about the gCreator gMax. . . The guy I talked to said that his dual extruder setup doesn't drip with retractions of only 3-4 mm. I asked him how he could get by with such a short retraction, and he attributed it to having a fan duct for the "bed" fan which is very low down and more or less wrapped around the nozzles and blowing directly on them. It would take some experimenting to figure out if the short retraction is due to the fan blowing on the nozzle, or the J Head hot end, or keeping the PLA dry. The dual extruder print was very clean and he claimed not to have used a drip tower or ooze shield.

[insta]

On other printers, I've seen no ooze at all from a 2mm retract with ABS. It is possible but requires a few things:

1) A very short hot zone. The printer in question used a Hexagon hotend, which has a relatively small hot area.
2) A very good thermal break with active cooling. Same Hexagon, uses a teensy little stainless steel thermal break and lots of fins on the cold side.
3) Fast retraction. He was retracting at 150mm/sec, 2mm (Bowden), 10000 m/s^2 retract accel with a massive hybrid NEMA17 running at 2A.
4) Very dry ABS. It required a bake in the oven overnight.

[Lateralg]

What hot end temperature?

[jimc]

i went on the gmax website. they have a couple cool models there for free download.

http://www.gmaxprinter.com