Andrew (R.S Admin)
Our first attempt at printing a mold in our high temp resin didn't work out. We used some "recommended" settings for our slicer, but they were just wrong.
So I grabbed the settings recommended by the manufacturer, and we're printing again.
I had to head home, so I won't find out how it did until the morning.
If it didn't work, we'll adjust the settings and try a third time. It normally takes me about three or four tries to get a new resin dialed in.
Andrew (R.S Admin)
Our plastic recycling operation is working surprisingly well!
Crush up some plastic, feed it in to the machine, out comes pellets suitable for injecting.
It's easy enough.
Andrew (R.S Admin)
Regardless, the thing that is taking the longest right now is prepping the digital files for printing.
These models are mostly sculpted, rather than built from primitives. That means that our files are ... messy. Lots of extraneous polygons, too many voids, etc.
It's tricky to get these meshes to play nice when we slice them up, or when we try to subtract them from our mold template.
There are just Complicated geometries at work, you know?
Andrew (R.S Admin)
But we're learning and getting better.
We should have a little keshi style robot tomorrow. Maybe also a keshi Commando Cody.
They should be made entirely out of recycled plastic, probably milk jugs.
If things go well, we'll be able to go from finished digital file to a production run of 100 or more pieces in two hours.
Andrew (R.S Admin)
Once we have the resin settings dialed in, we can print a mold in about an hour.
We probably need to print them standing up for the best resolution, not laying down, but printing them laying down takes an hour, and printing them standing up takes 6 hours.
If we get sufficient resolution laying down, we can do 1 mold per hour per printer, or somewhere in the ball park of 14 per printer, or 42 per working day in the makerspace.
Andrew (R.S Admin)
If we print them standing up, it's basically the same throughput, put with higher latency.
That is to say that we can print 5 or 6 at a time, but it will take 6 hours for them to print.
tiflolinux.org - GNU Social is a social network, courtesy of tiflolinux.org. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.1-beta0, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All tiflolinux.org - GNU Social content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.