I'm back, baybee!This all started when bitseeker finally decided to adopt my venerable old 454 and give it the attention it deserves but I could no longer provide. Once I had a taker on the old girl, I realized I would need to pack it so it got there in one piece; I literally spent half a day trying to think of a way I could pack it and reasonably expect it to make it all the way there without one or more delicate knobs getting effed up... in the end I realized there was no other way but to print up a front cover for it, as the real thing is pretty much rare as unicorn poop, and priced accordingly.
So I spent another afternoon designing it, and then I had some issues with my printer not liking the Gcode and randomly trying to print the damned thing at like 60% scale one time and then 100% the next... with the same exact file! I resliced it and STILL the same problem... so I powered through and eventually got a good start printing.
After a
40 hour print, it FINALLY printed successfully... and I put it on the floor and STOOD ON IT with all my 300 lbs.
And it HELD. :
I'm pretty pleased, actually... all the fails manifested right at the beginning, and were relatively easy to resolve before finally setting my Tornado to print for a
FULL WORK WEEK straight!Trial-fitting was less than perfect; it was a "tight press-fit". I had to thump the cover on with the heel of my big ol' Shrek hamhands, but it would at least go on all the way. I found that the radius of the corners was NOT a perfect match to the outer bezel of the 454; this may have been an error on my part measuring the radius, or it may have been due to my having to rescale the entire model to 0.982 because of a measurement error I made when I was starting the project.
Once I touched up the inside corners with a heat gun I was able to get a moderate press-fit on the 454's outer bezel, I declared success and took a few victory pics, then it was time to pack up my old beast...
...and now to the details of the print:
So... what settings?
0.2mm LH, 60/30mm speed, 30% GRID infill with "Connect Infill Lines" enabled at 10% overlap for strength. 1.2mm on all outer surfaces, 200°C printhead temp for PLA+, 75°C bed temp with 12x12 Lowes mirror tile print surface. Brim adhesion enabled, with supports everywhere at default angle.The supports actually seemed to help; they only generated a few layers around the area between the brim and the front curved surface, but those compound curves turned out much more uniform with zero "straggler" strands of filament in the outer surface.
And YES, I used hairspray... I was NOT going to give Murphy an excuse to eff things up halfway through such a long print!
And I got a near-mirror surface anyways, so win-win!
I've been having issues with pulling/premature release on the outer edges/corners of large prints correlating with measured uneven heating on the bed with the mirror tiles. I suspected this was due in part to heat loss caused by layers of ceramic-glass bed and glass tile with essentially an insulative layer of plastic (the clone Build-Tak surface) in between. In hopes of maintaining adhesion over such a long, large print... I cranked up the bed heat to 75°C to compensate. It worked here... but as many have warned it would do, the Tevo "Build-Tak" clone print surface has bubbled. I'm going to have to remove it. But SUCCESS HERE ON THIS PRINT!
You all have NO IDEA how hard it was for me NOT to plaster the thread with all these pics, as I checked in on the print over a day and a half:
1) A good start...
2) Good inner face and walls...
3) Almost...
4) Done! Now... to wait an hour for it to cool completely so I don't rip its face off trying to separate it... EFF THAT!!! Turn the ceiling fan on high and crank the AC down to 67°F!!! 30 minutes of snap, crackle, pop later... it jumped off by itself right into my hot little hands!
5) I totally eyeball-measured the location of this slot for the latch-catch... I got it pretty close. But the depth I deliberately got just right so you COULD add spring-steel hooks to snap onto these catches, if you so desire.
6) However, I did NOT make allowances for the rubber feet that belong here. That didn't even dawn on me until it was halfway through the print.
I still don't care; I'm dead-chuffed with the results, because:
7) MONEY SHOT!!!
mnem
Thanks bean, for giving us a place to natter about our silly little projects!