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Teaching old bots new tricks: Warping

A project log for My machinery 2021: Direct Granules Extruder

Waste plastic turned into raw material for 3D printing.

norbert-heinzNorbert Heinz 09/03/2021 at 10:430 Comments

Warping occurs due to material shrinkage while 3D printing. Hot plastics is put on top of a cold layer and while cooling down, the top layer shrinks and so builds up tensions in your print. The larger your print and the more the material shrinks while cooling down, the sooner the corners of the print start to lift and detach from the build plate. ABS is well known for high shrinkage and that's why two spools of that material were lying in a corner of my workshop for years. When I got an offer for making a video about a 3D printer I decided that it would be the right time to prove ideas to fight warping that grew in my brain over the years:

The idea is not to print in pure horizontal layers, but to add a vertical component. The gcode for this printing method was generated by Python scripts (available in the "files" section of this Hackaday project). No need for a new printer nor for making any hardware changes to your existing machine. It seems to work fine for special cases, as demonstrated in the video, but more experimentation has to be carried out. Good luck, I have some more ideas to continue fighting....

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