On Saturday (3/9/2011) Madox bought his Up! 3D Printer to the space so that we could see the print quality of this 'off the shelf' printer.
The setup was a 5-10 minute - find a bench, attach the print head and search for an un-used power power point. Then we were ready for a calibration print. From recollection the calibration print took about 30 minutes. As a side note it was later discovered that there was a slight error made in the calibration and hence the prints were not as good as they could have been - which is interesting because the printer still produced high quality prints.
Servo Bracket
This is a print of an servo mounting bracket that I am working on, both as a practical mount and as a learning exercise for modeling parts to actually use. The model is parametric and the values used for this print are fairly aggressive (and not practical for actual use). However the Up! did a good job - I am especially impressed by how well it managed the hooks circled in red which are 1mm thick
Vertical Blind Hanger
The hangers inside the blinds in my unit are pretty poor quality and hence fail every so often - very annoying! Madox modeled it in 5-10 minutes and then we printed two - one horizontally and one vertically. In the image below the top two are printed copies of the broken part at the bottom. The two printed ones have gone in to use as replacement parts.
Organic Lamp Post
We then started looking for more challenging parts to print. Thing9 is pretty cool and looked challenging so we gave that a go. The Up! has three print qualities, Fast, Normal and Fine - the estimated print time on Fine was 4:15 hours and 1:30 hours on Normal, so we settled for Normal. The results are sill impressive and John tells me it could have been better if we had understood the model well before we printed. There is some damage to the roof area - which was the result of me being clumsy removing the support material.
Elvis
We decided to push the boundaries of detail and print an Elvis head (I can't find the model on Thingiverse at the moment). To make it more interesting (and better quality for a reason I haven't entirely understood yet) the model was printed on a 45 degree slope with most of the model suspended using support. The results are quite impressive, but we should have printed it larger to get more detail in the face.
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