Test castings

Moving along in my project I realized I needed to solidify my ideas and come up with a final form for these objects to manifest themselves. Taking inspiration from my previous test of casting the foam cutouts in plaster, and my prior experiences in concrete, I decided to try casting these shapes in concrete. For

Syringe Pump?

Building off my caulk gun idea, I thought it might be useful to use liquids such as paint or acetone in a controlled manner. Enter the syringe pump. I found some files on thingiverse that got me started and allowed for a quick proof of concept. However, the design was both lacking and intended for

The Caulk Gun

Moving on from pyrography, I started testing out some messier and more unpredictable outputs. The first test, tubes of construction adhesive. Machine in action video (Google drive Link)

Adding Efficiency and Polish

My initial tests prints worked but left a lot to be desired. First and foremost I had to change the movement. The hand drawn arcs were nice but a hassle to reconfigure when I wanted to change the size, or the order that the machine draws the dots. So I dove into grasshopper, drawing the

Up and Running

The Machine Works (Mostly) Dylan, my modified 3D printer is up and running, creating pyro-graphic recreations of supplied images. The images are processed through a grasshopper algorithm which maps the brightness values of the image to time values for the burner to remain on the wood. While there are still some minor issues to work

Modifying the Printer (10/25/21)

First Draft After removing the old x-carriage assembly with the extruder motor and the hot end, I got to work building my new attachments. The STL for the x-carriage mount freely available, so I printed one off to use as the base of the design. From there I mocked up a quick prototype from wood,

Preliminary Printer Tests

Getting acquainted with the printer interface This week I performed some initial tests and trials to see how my wood burning idea would manifest. I connected the printer to pronterface and sent move and temperature commands. I also played with grasshopper, looking at Hoover’s custom plugin to generate g-code from grasshopper curves, but was unsuccessful

Examining gCode

For this week’s homework I compared the gcode for two objects I have fabricated, a 3d Print on a PrusaMK3s, sliced in Prusa Slicer, and a 3d carving milled on the Fanuc CNC router with gCode from RhinoCam. I noticed many similarities, like G1 for move commands, and the syntax of how comments are inserted.

Shop Adventures Vol. 2

In the dark days of yesteryear , the Graphtec plotter only printed with one pen, a thin, black, felt tip marker. The drawings were colorless, and only consisted of an single, narrow line weight.
Then came the hero, the one called Simon, who modeled and 3d printed a new collet, allowing a new type of pen to grace the plotter’s paper.

Shop Adventures Vol. 1

The mystery of the Graphtec plotter Disclaimer: These are just my observations, I make no claim to facts Context: I wanted to use the plotter to draw some posters for my upcoming show. I was printing these out in batches of 10 to minimize color changes, time, and wear on the paper which will disintegrate