Tonight on As the 3DP Churns...
mnem
On every 3d printer there should be a sign: "It'll fit next time"
In all honesty... I got most of my revision-ing done in the first few parts. Since then, it's been running pretty close to nonstop for days now. *knock on wood*
The nosepieces were the ball-buster; once I got to actually printing, I was still fighting layer adhesion issues. But those first three partial prints still allowed me to revise text location and resize the LED opening to allow for squish; I actually managed 3 revisions in one afternoon before the successful (but too short by 10mm) print in the back. I'm going to take the piss on that one and blame the preceding week of
for me not noticing that it was too small in the Z axis until I had the actual part in my hand.
That said... the nosepieces take ~7.5 hours each; so those 3 failed prints and one bonehead fail all in one afternoon actually saved me more than a day and ~$6 wasted filament.
After that, the two on the right came out exactly how I wanted them.
Here you can see my progression in designing the tailpiece; the first version in back suffered some cosmetic bunge due to orientation, and it didn't actually muffle anything at all. But having it in hand DID give me the idea for what would become the final product; that channel on the bottom was originally added as an afterthought, but after chopping the ass off the piece in Fusion, what remained became an actual muffler that works.
The part on the left was the first version of the successful part; I did some cosmetic refinement (mostly reworking the fillets so they match the nosepieces and adding a tube for the LED mount) in the part on the right but the biggest improvement came from just reorienting the piece. I originally printed it foot down, figuring that would work better for the filament bridging necessary to make the slots in the muffler, and I was concerned that the support material might pull the slots apart. The bridging in the slots turned out a bit stringy, but the supports did behave. Most noticeably, the ceiling area inside the part had lots of nasty stringing, plus the finish pattern in the top is really obtrusive.
The part on the right is mostly just reoriented to print on the butt of the piece; this greatly improved the quality of the slots, making straight bridging and clean slats which are only a few lines wide with excellent layer adhesion. More importantly, the ceiling became a sidewall in the print, so no stringing... and the ugly pattern that was on the top gets nicely massaged away by the sandstone finish of the Build-Tak. Best of all, the new design and this orientation makes what was a 11.5 hour print now a 5.5 hour print.
So at this point... it's just a matter of making 6 copies of the two pieces, and doing the modding of the actual PSUs. Nice, boring
fiddly-bits work.
mnem