Here are a couple more ideas for 3D printed projects. The first is a small, 50mm diameter fan blade. This is useful for air cooling small IC engines. The picture actually looks quite a bit rougher than the object itself. This fan blade was printed in PLA.
The second item is a nylon bushing. I've successfully printed nylon using Talman Nylon-230. It prints at 230 degrees C with a bed temperature of 45 degrees C. The resulting part is incredibly tough with excellent interlayer bonding. And, being nylon, it is pretty low friction, useful for sliding or low RPM rotational bearings. I think this material would also make good 3D printed gears.
Speaking of gears, here is a clock gear I 3D printed:
The larger gear is a little over 2.75" diameter and has 72 teeth. The smaller gear has 10 teeth. This was printed in PLA
I've finally finished the larger 3D printer I started building several years ago. The electronics have given me the most trouble. I bought an Azteeg X5 mini control board primarily because it will operate on 24 volts and it uses a 32 bit Arm processor. It also has a text based configuration file so you don't have to recompile the firmware to make configuration changes. On the downside, the board is somewhat finicky and the documentation is pretty much nonexistent. I've spent many, many hours ironing out all the connections and configuration settings. I'm using a Raspberry PI 2 running Octopi to run the printer. The Linux based Octopi controls the 3D printer through a USB connection and you connect to the Raspberry PI with a web browser. This means you can control the 3D printer with a remote PC, a tablet, or a smart phone... anything that has a web browser.
I'll post some pictures of the printer and perhaps a video of it printing something sometime in the next few days.
Chuck
