Monday, January 10, 2011

I haven't had much to write about, but I have been printing stuff. Check out the designs I've shared on Thingiverse
In addition to the clear PLA I started with, I'm also now printing with black. The black PLA has been uneventful, to the point where I just warm up the machine and start printing. Some prints take 8 hours or more, but I don't have to babysit them anymore. :-) That lets me get more ambitious, like a 20-hour print I'm in the middle of now. I just slept through the first part of it. To date, I've had about 30 successful prints. At some point I had heard that the acrylic I used as a build surface deteriorates after as few as 20 prints, but I don't see any evidence of that with PLA. (My build still has some scars from when I was trying ABS.) The PLA keeps a good bond to Acrylic while printing, (it needs to so it doesn't move around) but I slide a spatula-shaped Xacto knife underneath, and the whole model pops up when I get enough leverage. The acrylic is left pretty clean. This works even on large 8" models.