Showing posts with label apron. Show all posts
Showing posts with label apron. Show all posts

Sunday 12 September 2010

Some corners like it hot

Large objects with sharp corners, such as the Mendel z-leadscrew-base, produce enough stress to form a blister in the PET tape on my heated bed. These can only be flattened again by pricking the tape. I can't understand how air gets in and cannot get out again, but that is what seems to happen.

The blisters leave a small indentation in the object's base. It is only an aesthetic problem because the base remains flat, i.e. it doesn't rock on a flat surface.

Sometimes the blister allows the corner to peel from the bed towards the end of a build, allowing the corner to curl upwards a little. Generally I can avoid that by cleaning the bed with acetone before problem builds. I also use hexagonal infill on those parts and only two solid layers rather than three in an attempt to reduce the stress. When I design my own parts I round the corners, where possible, to prevent such problems.

A solution may be to use a sheet of PET rather than PET tape, but then you need to find a way of holding it down. One thing I have noticed though is that when I build a bed with four of the z-brackets closely packed the corners on the inside don't blister or lift. That must be because the air around them is hotter. As an experiment I added some little plastic walls to the build to act as baffles to keep the heat in as the bed moves through cooler air.


These have a 5mm thick base to help keep the tape flat and are 1mm away from the edge of the object. They work well and stop the blisters forming at the corners. They are very similar to Forrest's apron technique but their primary function is thermal rather than mechanical. A more general technique would be to build a thin wall all the way around the perimeter of the objects to cocoon them. I expect that would only need to be one filament thick and perhaps might give a similar effect to having a heated build chamber.