08 - Adventures with a "Jumbo" print (9/1/14)

Post date: Sep 1, 2014 2:31:34 PM

This post is intended to document the testing of the size limits of my machine.

A beloved family member made a request to create one of these:

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:381599 (thanks hitsman)

"4 inches long should be big enough" was the answer when I inquired as to "how big?"

I imported it into Tinkercad, scaled it, downloaded, sliced and printed.

slic3r settings: 1.75 mm PLA (COEX3D true blue), .4 mm nozzle, .22 mm layer height, 15% fill, 60 mm/s perims and fills

print time: just over 4 hours

how cute!

Well, one thing led to another and the question became "What's the largest I can make it?"

The first step was to re-measure the physical travel limits, review the marlin firmware settings, as well as slic3r and pronterface configs to get specifics on size and to make sure they all matched reality and each other. The limits as they were currently configured were X: 266.7 mm (10 1/2"), Y: 324 mm (12 3/4"), Z: 282.4 (just over 11 inches). There is slightly more physical travel available but decided this would be big enough to continue the adventure.

The model was scaled up to about 10" long, the height and width were checked to make sure it would fit, it was sliced to "only fill at 15% where needed" and when loaded into pronterface, it reported a crazy amount of filament, about 168 meters. Also the time was quite high.

After checking online and finding that a 1kg spool of 1.75 PLA should have just over 300 meters, and judging there was about 2/3 on the blue spool (the requested color). The print was started at about 8pm. A few hours in it was looking pretty good.

In the morning, about 10.5 hours in, it was still making music

And late morning about 15.5 hours in, still going strong, though the spool of filament was looking pretty small...

Also it was looking... well... freakishly unnatural.

After 18 hours and 48+ minutes, it was complete! and there is still some blue filament left! (I was prepared to finish it off in black or some other PLA if the blue ran out).

There were a few flaws such as layer gaps (in order to really conserve plastic I used a .35 layer height on a .4 nozzle, the layer height was just a tiny bit high) but overall it was pretty solid (3 perimeter walls).

Please Note the following shot is NOT done in a "fisherman's style" with the arms extended.

This thing is so big, the original 4" version easily fits inside the planter hole

So there you have it, adventures in a jumbo print. It could have been a little bit larger, but I remain quite satisfied with the performance of this "relatively low-cost" machine.