Well, it’s working, and quite nicely. I don’t have the print range of a TOM, but I have quality, and that’s what I was after.
The trick to getting it all working was replacing the Z stepper that shipped with Cupcake #235 and replacing it with a more powerful one from Lin Engineering (which required a new metric pulley from SDPSI). The Z-table is now quite zippy and does not stall like the old one did.
Photos and parts lists to be posted everything’s a scattered mess in the aftermath of Pittsburgh MiniMaker Faire, the lasersaur build, fixing my mom’s laptop, and a thousand other papercuts.
I wanted to make a sturdy-but-hollow manifold for the air assist on my lasersaur. I ended up using a trick I’ve seen in catacombs and gothic structures — internal support columns.
The STL and images are posted over on thingiverse. The short of it is:
- make a hollow object
- determine which way will be up/down when you print it
- add columns along this axis that are close enough together and to the edge that the spanning shells will hold
- print!
Here’s an example: The top piece is a completed print, the bottom is a partial print showing the base, rotated 90 degrees. You can see the starts of the three columns that support the rest of the print and the inlet (the big hole on the top print) and the outlet on the other side of the print:
It’s really just that simple.
