Repper's delight

Stained glass traditional making is an art that exists since centuries, in which pieces of glass are arranged to form patterns, held together by strips of lead known as the "came". But special precautions should be taken when working with this metal to avoid lead contamination.

So I wondered how 3D printing and other materials could be used instead of lead...

Almost 7 years ago I published my first version of the "Sceaming hand" Santa Cruz's emblematic design.
And honestly when I look back at it I think it doesn't deserve the more than 250 likes I received on Thingiverse (at the time of writing).
It's now time to make a better one...

This is the first big print I did back in 2018 as a trophy for a table-soccer tournament.
It was printed in 3 parts on a Ultimaker2 Extended printer, glued back and painted.
In this post I will show you the different steps.

Printing big objects is something I wanted to do since a long time.
But 3d printing is such a slow process that it discouraged me until now (I have some free spare time).
Still it's important to plan ahead to reduce printing time to a minimum and avoid support structures as much as you can.

I recently modeled a few things from my last 3 months trip to Bulgaria.
I hope you will like them...

In the last years I made several designs that I never published or shared.

To start this new year 2014 I decided to share them with you... Happy printing !

The Z homing on a BfB Rapman is insured by an inverted bolt placed at the back of the extruder.
The bolt's head is actioning the Z switch when the bed moves up.
The bed to nozzle distance can be controled by tuning the lenght of that inverted bolt.

But I think it could be made much easier...

Leveling the Rapman's bed to ensure it's perfectly parallel to the XY toolhead's plane is something important.
Until now, like a lot of people I guess, I was doing it "by eye", trying to achieve a thickness of about 3 sheets of paper (hot-end/bed distance) where the 3 leveling bolts are placed (back left and right corners + middle front).
It usually is enough for classic 3D printing.

But as I allready said, for pen-plotting and especially for milling, it's important to insure that the bed is perfecly leveled. Or at least as perfect as it can be.
So we're going to need a more "scientific" way to make sure the bed is at an equal distance to the toolhead (at least at these 3 leveling points).

And I think there is an easy way...

I usually print with a layer thickness of 0.4mm and I'm happy with that.
The print quality is correct, and the print time is acceptable (though it's never fast enough...).

But I know that a Rapman can do better than that. So let's ask it a bit more and see what it can do...

Tuning my Rapman is real fun.
But I'd like to print something else than just spare parts from time to time.
So let's make a little pause...