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Early forays into 3D printing for HPR parts:
3D Printing 3D printing large parts
- Thread starter JohnCoker
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Great video. Break up a large print is one thing I need to get good at.
John great video, what CAD program do use? BTW I just received the new Nozzle X for my MK3. I typically print at .2 and sometimes .15, but I have never really observed that .15 was 25% better in resolution. That is until now. I ordered both the .4 and .35 Nozzle X and I installed the .35. With that I just printed something at .15 and man is it clean. The resolution difference now is night and day. I would say out of all the modifications I have done this is the most obvious improvement.
I will have to figure out how to gussets and rabbits in tinkered.
I would like to see the finished booster nose cones. Those are the kind of parts that seem ideal for a 3D printer. I know how to cut things apart in OpenSCAD (well, sorta) but I have no idea how to in Solid Edge. Will be interesting to see if I can figure it out.
Thanks for the tips,
Tony
Thanks for the tips,
Tony
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I've been using Rhino, but I will eventually switch to Fusion 360 (which seems to be more popular).
I am still using the 0.4mm nozzle that came with it. For detail parts, a finer resolution would definitely be nice, but for these largish parts, I'm fine with the coarseness of the default nozzle.
I will eventually try smaller nozzles to see how that works, but these things take so long to print that I'll wait until it really matters.
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You don't need any special features. For a rabbet, draw a tube that overlaps the end of the part and the "subtract" it from the part. For a gusset, draw another part that forms the gusset (disks or triangular solids). You don't even need to join them; just export them in the same STL file and the slicer will treat it all as the same part.
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So do I! I'm still refining the parts (I eventually need four). Right now, I'm trying printing the mid section as a single piece since only the tip really needs to be split to accommodate the aluminum bracket.
I'm not sure if it helps, but this is how I've done in Rhino:
- draw whole part in however many pieces you need
- draw a plane through the center
- select the part pieces
- use Boolean Split, splitting with the plane
- select each piece of the part and Cap Planar Holes
Being a long-time hacker and a 3-D printing noob, I had to give it a try. My lathe skills are at best moderate. I always dreamed of printing the plugs for my larger nose cone molds. So here it is. Yet another nose cone designer. Rename the attached .txt file as a .scad file and open it in OpenSCAD with the customizer enabled. You'll have a little UI that lets you design and tweak any of the 10 basic styles described on the wikipedia "Nose Cone Design" page. The program also lets you specify the size of your maximum print volume. If your nose cone is too big, it'll slice and dice it to fit. The program adds alignment tabs and gussets as necessary when large cones are chopped. There are also a couple parameters to control the looseness of the fit for the alignment tabs. I've only printed a couple cones so far, but it seems like it's working, well.
Enjoy!
Enjoy!
Wow, very cool. I downloaded it and tried it out. It works well in inches. When I tried the metric option though the slider limits prevented me from entering any practical numbers. Looking over the code I see the slider values are comments after the variable definition. Seems like you'd almost need two files, one with the values for metric and the other for imperial.
Otherwise, a very useful file, already learned quite a bit by looking over the code. Thanks for posting.
Tony
Thanks! I thought I had picked range values that covered both the mm and inches options. Which ones were most offensive? You're probably right that there should just be two files. What I really wanted was to be able to compute the range endpoints based on the units choice.
Doh! I see now. I must have had 2.54 mm/inch in my head when I entered some of those ranges.
... and here's one that doesn't divide by zero when using mm's.
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Excellent work! (I added a link to my page.)
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I can't figure out how to export the individual pieces as STL files for slicing. When I've created objects in OpenSCAD before I can render individual pieces, but I can't figure out how to do that here. I'm using Cura for slicing and I can't see a way in that to break the STL into pieces.
Is there an intermediate step I need to use in this case?
swatkat
Down these mean skies, a kat must fly!
I don't know about Cura. I export a single STL from OpenSCAD and use Slic3r PE (Prusa Edition) for slicing. It has an Object/Split menu option that finds each of the separate pieces and drops them on the X-Y plane. From there you can delete, replicate, and arrange as you like.
Thanks you gave me the phrase to search for and I found out that Cura no longer does that, but that there are other applications that do such as Meshmixer.
I am going to have to try this.
@kalsow This is AWESOME. I've been struggling with printing different shape NC using TinkerCad and then I found your amazing OpenSCAD file. Wow! I do seem to be having a few problems (like wall thickness in mm causing the cone to print solid), but I'm sure its something I'm doing. Anyway, THANK YOU for sharing this tool.
Make sure you're using the latest version of the code. See post #20 above. At least one of the earlier versions had bugs when using metric units.
P.S. You're welcome!
Here's an updated version of the nose cone designer. It can print little supports (in blue below) under the shoulder so you don't need slicer-provided supports. Another new feature allows you to give the coupler below the shoulder a narrower waist, reducing friction with the airframe tube.
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I use onshape.com CAD, but did something akin to Mendal and kalsow. And it works, if a bit heavier.
This is really great! I had not seen this before but definitely will save me some time since I was manually creating these myself. Thank you for sharing.
One small suggestion - It could be useful to have the option to include a Kevlar chord mount in the shoulder (I usually just put a 6-8mm cylinder with a 2mm hole in it against one side of the shoulder). Obviously easy enough to add this in separately but may be an easy / useful feature (and obviously larger builds would require different size / configuration mounts). Another option would be a cross or other features to "close off the nose cone". I rarely do solid NC shoulder bases anymore but have started putting some simple structures (cross members and sometimes inner hoops) across the nose cone base to avoid the parachute getting jammed into nose cone and to give something to tie shock chord to if I use elastic.
One small suggestion - It could be useful to have the option to include a Kevlar chord mount in the shoulder (I usually just put a 6-8mm cylinder with a 2mm hole in it against one side of the shoulder). Obviously easy enough to add this in separately but may be an easy / useful feature (and obviously larger builds would require different size / configuration mounts). Another option would be a cross or other features to "close off the nose cone". I rarely do solid NC shoulder bases anymore but have started putting some simple structures (cross members and sometimes inner hoops) across the nose cone base to avoid the parachute getting jammed into nose cone and to give something to tie shock chord to if I use elastic.
