Sometimes after I finish a print I know I’m going to print something else in a few minutes. In those cases I want to keep the heater warm rather than waiting to cool it down, warm it back up, and then start printing. Here’s my new idea – I use the in between print time to print something quick, simple, useful, and relatively worry-free.
Insulator retainer rings. I’m guessing you just can’t have too many of these. As suggested by Cathal Garvey, this should be a high priority print.
InnovationByLayers has done it again. As soon as I saw he had uploaded a dalek STL, I downloaded, skeinforged it, and started printing. 1 hour and 28 minutes with a 50% infill:
Obviously you can’t print it with the arms and eye stalk as part of the body due to overhang issues. However, I wrapped the unsharp end of my smallest drill bit (1/16″) in a thick rubber band to give it grip and drilled three holes for the arms and eye stalk. I then used pieces of discarded filament that had been stretched as I backed it out of the extruder for the arms and eye stalk. I wrapped the arms/eye stalk in small pieces of black electrical tape to finish the look. Here’s what it looked like before I augmented it:
In fact, I was so pleased with this build that I printed up a second with a 0% infill. FYI, that took 52 minutes and apparently had no affect on the final product. Although, it does sound hollow.
Disclaimer: This is only for Windows XP. It worked for me and may not work for you. I’m a complete novice, so use at your own risk. That said, this procedure completely fixed the “avrdude: stk500_disable(): protocol error, expect=0x14, resp=0x51” errors I was getting in the Arduino environment.
Congratulations!
A huge thank you to Jet and Rick Pollack for walking me through this procedure step by step.
