3d extrusion printers

[cteno4]

Hey has anyone been playing much at all with 3d extrusion printers these days with 1/150 scale? Curious if the cheaper 100 micron resolution level is worth even fiddling with at all for 1/150 stuff. Figured it might be fun to fiddle a little with a cheap one to get the hang of what you can do with extrusion printing and relearn some of my 3d cad neurons. It's a big price jump usually to go under the 100 micron resolution.

 

Jeff

[Kiha66]

I have a Monoprice Select Mini, which for $200 is a pretty great deal for getting into 3d printing.  Not always perfect prints right out of the box, but there is a very good online community with plenty of upgrades and help to fix any problems.  It's been great for making details and structures, but the print quality isn't up to making finished model train bodies sadly.  It is nice for seeing how your design looks before getting it professionally printed though, and the print speed is quite fast.  

The banding issues in the photos are due to a loose Y axis rod that I need to re-tighten.  The cat and tank are about an inch 5 cm high, printed in thicker layer heights to speed up the printing.  

[kvp]

Hey has anyone been playing much at all with 3d extrusion printers these days with 1/150 scale? Curious if the cheaper 100 micron resolution level is worth even fiddling with at all for 1/150 stuff. Figured it might be fun to fiddle a little with a cheap one to get the hang of what you can do with extrusion printing and relearn some of my 3d cad neurons. It's a big price jump usually to go under the 100 micron resolution.

I tried a test print on a collegue's printer, but turns out the biggest problem is not the movement resolution or the layer thickness, both got improved over time, but the material thickness. Most print heads have a fixed filament output width and you can position this with a higher resolution than the diameter of the material. The results were sadly not up to any acceptable standards.

 

I think i'll just wait until light activated resin volumetric printing becomes available, since in that case, the resolution is the display pixel and not the nozzle on some huge mechanical hotglue gun, like in case of these filament printers.

[cteno4]

Kiha,

 

Ha! that's the one I was looking at! Figured for $200 it was in the range of play with it and see if I could find a use for trains! Yeah was not expecting to print cars, was wondering more for scenery buts or building details.

 

I agree for most 1/150 liquid polymer will be the way to go when it gets more affordable and supplies stabler, but that may be a ways off.

 

Thinking for now more to just get cad skills back and fiddle. But little time to play but it keeps catching my eye all the time in their ads.

 

Btw monoprice has always been a super source for cabels and wire. About the best price around and quality is really good. Excellent cs and a few times when I screwed up and realized I needed a special cable on a job I could call by 4 and someone would get in next day fedex for me. I got turned onto them like 15 years back when a friend who does very high end theater installs was using them. Lots of engineers out there love them have tested the cables and found them great. Private resident video/audiofile installs use to try to get my friend to use redicously expensive trendy cables and he use to wire it up a test with monoprice and tell them it had the high end cables and then have them experience it and of course they thought it was sooo good, then he would let them know it was mono price and they could save a couple of thousand dollars... they usually ate their hats, but some just had to have the name brand to brag.

 

I've used them on many exhibit installs and never a failure or issue! Save a lot of budget over the years which was good as all non profits with little budget to start with!

 

Jeff

[Kiha66]

I'd definitely recommend it, its pretty fun even if the details aren't amazing.  We also printed a whole bunch of clip-on temporary track bumpers for the local train club to isolate tracks being worked on and also create operational puzzles on running nights.  

[HantuBlauLOL]

these are some 1/150 trains that i have made with a FDM printer. not that smooth, but the quality is pretty acceptable imho.

 

[cteno4]

Wow that’s better than I would have thought an extrusion printer could do n scale detail! Nice work! What is the resolution of your printer? Regular abs filament?

 

jeff

[HantuBlauLOL]

12 hours ago, cteno4 said:

Wow that’s better than I would have thought an extrusion printer could do n scale detail! Nice work! What is the resolution of your printer? Regular abs filament?

 

jeff

 

thanks!

 

i use 0.05mm layer height for the cab face and bogies, and 0.1mm for anything else. i use regular PLA filament. i heard ABS is really painful to print.. so i avoid it.

Edited January 14, 2018 by HantuBlauLOL

[NXCALE]

Has anyone used small nozzles (0.25mm for instance) to 3D print at N scale?

 

I found this bridge (link: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1759449) whose author recommends using a 0.25mm nozzle.

But I was wondering if a smaller nozzle (maybe 0.2mm?) would be better for N scale printing in general.

 

Btw, my printer has a standard 0.4mm nozzle at the moment which I am planning to replace. Cheers.

[kvp]

1 hour ago, NX: said:

Has anyone used small nozzles (0.25mm for instance) to 3D print at N scale?

I found this bridge (link: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1759449) whose author recommends using a 0.25mm nozzle.

But I was wondering if a smaller nozzle (maybe 0.2mm?) would be better for N scale printing in general.

Btw, my printer has a standard 0.4mm nozzle at the moment which I am planning to replace. Cheers.

If your printer can support it (both the filament type and the feed stepper), then the smaller the better. Some designs might depend on a certain nozzle size, but usually solid models could be generated for a wide range of nozzles and feed/head speeds without problems.

 

ps: Usually the filament material and the printer's stepper precision determines the minimal nozzle size, both the positioning and the feed stepper. The maximal nozze size also depends on the heating element in the head. The finest head i've seen used a piezo feeder for the printing push and a normal stepper for filament refill into the heated compartement. Most hobbyst 3d printers are directly heated/deposited, pretty much like a hotmelt glue gun, so feeding precision could get very important. Generally the rule of thumb is half the nozzle area with the same head speed requires half the feeding or a properly matched filament. Half the nozzle diameter is not half the area though as it's caluclated as (d/2)^2*PI.

[toc36]

Does anyone experience with the Formlabs Form 2 3D Printer?

[NXCALE]

15 hours ago, kvp said:

If your printer can support it (both the filament type and the feed stepper), then the smaller the better. Some designs might depend on a certain nozzle size, but usually solid models could be generated for a wide range of nozzles and feed/head speeds without problems.

 

ps: Usually the filament material and the printer's stepper precision determines the minimal nozzle size, both the positioning and the feed stepper. The maximal nozze size also depends on the heating element in the head. The finest head i've seen used a piezo feeder for the printing push and a normal stepper for filament refill into the heated compartement. Most hobbyst 3d printers are directly heated/deposited, pretty much like a hotmelt glue gun, so feeding precision could get very important. Generally the rule of thumb is half the nozzle area with the same head speed requires half the feeding or a properly matched filament. Half the nozzle diameter is not half the area though as it's caluclated as (d/2)^2*PI.

Thanks for the info, I was thinking that about the feeding speed.

Once I receive the 0.25 nozzle, I will create and test various slicer profiles until I find the right one. 

 

5 hours ago, toc36 said:

Does anyone experience with the Formlabs Form 2 3D Printer?

No, I just got a cheapy one.

[Welshbloke]

I now have a Flashforge Adventurer 3. Not much model production so far, but I did rescale a tank container kit from 1:87 to 1:80 and will be modifying it to fit a Tomix KoKi 200 as soon as I get around to printing the rest of it (did the base to check the length and width were right).

 

I've been printing GoPro brackets, a battery tray and a case for a single 18650 cell (to carry a spare for my good torch):

 

 

 

I'll start a thread about the tanktainer when I have some useful advice about how to modify it to fit the Tomix KoKis. At the moment there's a cross brace exactly where the mounting clip goes, so I'm considering how to get around that!