The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Tag: MK4

Prusa Mk 4 3D printer with MMU3 feeder

Miniature Planetary Gear Bearings

Because it’s easy to scale solid models:

Small Planetary Gear Bearings – PETG PETG-CF

The small bearings are 25 mm OD, with correspondingly small clearances between their moving parts, but they all spun easily after a bit of breaking in.

As with their larger cousins, the orange PETG bearing has the most axial play and worked just fine right off the platform. The gray PETG-CF bearing was jammed and required concerted effort to get the gears rolling, but now has essentially no axial play while turning easily. The snappy-looking orange and black bearing has very little play and feels the best of the three.

The single-material bearings take about 20 minutes to print, while the mixed material one requires 80 minutes due to the extruder purging and nozzle clearing. The larger mixed material bearing took more than three hours, but time doesn’t scale as the cube of the size because changing materials runs at a constant time:

Small Planetary Gear Bearings – PETG PETG-CF with wipe towers

The smaller mixed gear produced the smaller wipe tower on the right, but changing materials remains an expensive process. Of course, if you were doing this in production, you’d make a couple dozen of the little things in one job: the machine would spend most of its time squirting out planetary gear bearings with the same number of material changes building the same size wipe tower.

They’re slightly too small for my fingers and surely pose a choking hazard to children, but they’re definitely cute.

2024-09-17
Planetary Gear Bearing Fondletoy: M2 vs MK4

It’s been about a decade since I made a batch of planetary gear fondletoys:

Planetary Gear Bearing – black red natural

So I loaded up the same STL in Prusaslicer and made three more:

Planetary Gear Bearing – M2 vs MK4

Both pictures show the same red bearing, done in PLA on the Makergear M2. The other bearings are PETG and PETG-CF on the Prusa MK4 + MMU3.

The blue bearing has about 5 mm of axial play, a bit more than the red.

The gray bearing is PETG-CF and has maybe 1 mm of axial play, which agrees with my original observation that an Extrusion Multiplier of 1.0 results in slightly overstuffed carbon fiber parts. It’s not much and, frankly, produces a better fit in this case, but it’s different than pure PETG. Which should come as no surprise, of course, given that it’s 15% carbon.

The gray-and-orange bearing looks spectacular in person and has about 3 mm of axial play, roughly the same as the red bearing, which you’d expect from overstuffed PETG-CF and pure PETG.

The single-color bearings print in about 1.5 hours and the two-color one weighed in over four hours. Multi-material objects are do-able, but you gotta want the results.

I told Prusaslicer to wipe the orange filament into the gray infill during color changes (per the Wipe Tower doc), but those two gray parts have so little infill as to make no difference:

Planetary Gear Bearing – PETG PETG-CF with wipe tower

The wipe tower in that posed photo has a nubbly texture because the filament just gets squirted without regard to anything other than maintaining the basic tower shape.

Seeing things appear on the platform never gets old!

2024-09-13
Prusa MK4 + MMU3 vs. Steamopus

So as not to bury the lede:

Steamopus – test pieces

The model is the Steampunk Octopus (in retrospect, the lower-vertex NixFix version should print better with its under-engine braces). The tests were to see how well its articulated tentacles printed and whether I understood how PrusaSlicer’s Multimaterial Painting worked. The answers: “Perfectly” and “Undo is my copilot”.

They’re both in PETG, with the orange eyes & features painted onto the STL model using the Smart Fill tool type to select surface facets joined within a given angle. Getting that right requires some fiddling, because you (well, I) can inadvertently select & flood a nearby area.

With Halloween fast approaching, they should be useful:

Steamopus – black at door

Readers of long memory will recognize the doorbell button.

The albino Steamopus looks downright weird:

Steamopus – white at door

Only the delivery folks have seen them so far …

2024-09-12
Prusa MK4 vs. PETG-CF
Flushed with success after building a Keychain Pill Tube with orange PETG, I tried dark gray carbon-fiber PETG with the same settings:

Pill Tube – first PETG-CF

In real life, it’s a much darker gray.

It’s not only furry, it’s overstuffed: the threads didn’t engage at all.

Running a few single-thread calibration squares suggested an Extrusion Multiplier around 0.6 would produce the proper thread width. Making it so and trying again worked perfectly:

Pill tube – PETG-CF adjustments

Not only did the cap screw on easily enough, the exterior finish improved and most of the stringing went away.

However, the Mighty Dragorn of Kismet (who nerd-sniped me into getting the MK4 in the first place) observed that he’d been running PETG-CF with stock PETG settings and getting good dimensional results without further tuning.

After a few more gyrations, I did what I should have done first:

Eryone PETG-CF Temperature Tower

The label on the spool suggests a 230 °C to 250 °C extrusion temperature and 235 °C seems like the sweet spot between overly stringy and terrible bridging, although I’d never expect PETG to cross that kind of gap without some support. The 35° overhangs on the left look surprisingly good at any temperature.

With that set up, running solid calibration squares showed Dragorn was right: 1.0 EM works the way you’d expect and 0.65 EM produces under-filled surfaces:

MK4 Eryone PETG-CF 1.0 0.65 EM – top

The hand-knitted surface is more visible at a more oblique angle:

MK4 Eryone PETG-CF 1.0 0.65 EM – edge

The 0.2 mm layers look about the same on both squares.

Comparing plain PETG at 1.0 EM with those:

MK4 eSun PETG 1.0 EM – Eryone PETG-CF 1.0 0.65 EM

Set up a square with walls three threads thick:

Thinwall box – 3x 0.45 mm – slicer preview

With PrusaSlicer set to produce 0.45 mm thread widths, the walls should measure exactly 1.35 mm = 3×0.45 mm thick:
- PETG = 1.30 mm (1.29 to 1.30)
- PETG-CF = 1.40 mm (1.37 to 1.40)
While I think you could tweak the EM for both materials, it’s unlikely to make any practical difference on typical objects.

So it looks like a slightly lower temperature with 1.0 EM will produce good outside dimensions for the carbon fiber filaments, while models with precise thin sections will require careful tuning.
2024-09-08
MMU3 vs. Cart Coin Calibrators
The last time around, I used Cart Coins to verify platform alignment (a.k.a. “leveling”) on the Makergear M2. The Prusa MK4 does mesh probing to ensure accurate alignment, so these new Cart Coins exercised the MMU3 and gave me some giveaways for a recent dinner:

Cart Coin – assortment

The design, such as it is, mashes a PNG found on the InterWebs with a few go-fast stripes added in LightBurn to balance the layout inside a circle:

Cart Coin layout

The motivations for LightBurn:
- It’s convenient
- TroCraft Eco is within 0.1 mm of the proper thickness
- Laser-cut coins proceed with great speed
Normally you’d export the finished layout as an SVG, but OpenSCAD ignores “holes” within shapes, so I exported it as a PNG to serve as a binary height map:
- Import the PNG into OpenSCAD using surface()
- Resize it to 20 mm wide and 1.7 mm tall
- Knock it out of a 24 mm OD × 1.6 mm tall cylinder (which is why the extra 0.1 mm)
- Add the PNG again as a separate 1.6 mm object to refill the hole
Whereupon out pops a solid model:

Cart Coin – solid model

Export that as a 3mf file to keep the two objects aligned, import it into PrusaSlicer, then get multi-material on it:

Cart Coin – PrusaSlicer layout

There’s a fourth group with different colors in hiding. I printed 12 identical coins at a time, mostly so I could keep track of what was happening, and it ended well enough.

The black coins with the translucent retina-burn orange cart look surprisingly good.

But this is way faster:

They’re the size of a US quarter, because that’s what unlocks shopping carts around here. Feel free to tweak the parameters for your locale.

The OpenSCAD source code is almost a one-liner:
```
difference() {
    cylinder(d=24.0,h=1.6);

    resize([20.0,0,1.7],auto=true)
        linear_extrude(height=1,convexity=10)
           projection(cut=true)
            surface("/mnt/bulkdata/Project Files/Prusa Mk4/Models/Cart Coin/Cart Coin layout.png",
                    center=true,invert=true);
}

    color("Black")
        resize([20.0,0,1.6],auto=true)
            linear_extrude(height=1,convexity=10)
               projection(cut=true)
                surface("/mnt/bulkdata/Project Files/Prusa Mk4/Models/Cart Coin/Cart Coin layout.png",
                        center=true,invert=true);
```
Use them responsibly, OK?
2024-09-03
Sting-Kill: Everyday Carry Tube

One of Mary’s gardening cronies suggested Sting-Kill might reduce her dramatic swelling [^1] after a bee / wasp / insect sting. Because it must be applied immediately after the sting, the swab must be on hand in the garden or on a bike ride, but the glass vial inside seem entirely too fragile to survive amid the usual clutter of a purse / pocketbook / belt pack / bike pack.

Well, I can fix that:

Pill tube – PETG default

It’s a KeyChain Pill Tube from Printables, enlarged 20% in the XY plane to fit the Sting-Kill swab, with the white applicator end fitting neatly into the domed screw-on lid for a bit of cushioning.

The solid model looks about like you’d expect:

Pill Tube – slicer preview

Despite that preview, I printed it with a brim. PETG sticks tenaciously to the Textured PEI steel sheet and a brim wasn’t really needed; just pop the parts off the platform when cool.

Somewhat to my astonishment, the threads screwed together easily, smoothed out after a few on-and-off cycles, and it’s ready for a moment we both hope will never occur.

[^1] Mary did tote an EpiPen back in the day, but a few near misses indicated she’s no longer quite as sensitized. She does swell up something powerful and we’re hoping immediately applying a Sting-Kill will help knock it down.

2024-09-02
Prusa MK4 Platform Protector

While cleaning the bird’s nest off the extruder, the need for a protector over the steel build plate became obvious:

Prusa MK4 – platform cover sheet

Yes, it’s laser cut, which trivialized the two little holes for the locating screws in the back.

Given the dimensions, it should take you five minutes, tops, to cut your own from some chipboard:

Prusa MK4 Platform protector sheet doodles

The blobs along the front edge mark the magnets where you could add a bit of steel to snap the protector in place, if you’re inclined to remove the plate. I just let it sit there, which seems entirely sufficient.

Long ago I made a similar corrugated cardboard sheet for the M2 that is still covering its glass platform today.

2024-08-29