Greetings,
I have moved one step closer to living in the modern era. After much thinking, researching and a lot of agonizing, I bought a 3D printer. I settled on the Monoprice Maker Select Plus 3D Printer. Like a lot of new technology steps for me, there was a lot of confusion, new things that I struggled to understand and plenty of trial and errors. I have spent a great deal of time joining user groups, writing desperate requests for help, downloading software (Fusion 360 and Cura) and struggling to learn Fusion 360. Today, a light went off (or is it on?) and I felt ready to try my first print effort.
The first shot was a complete failure, but fortunately that became clear almost instantly and I was able to abort the print early. Some how the Z-axis home had shifted from the last time that I had leveled the bed and my print was just falling to pieces as it was attempting to generate the raft. I re-leveled the bed and tried again. This time things looked so much better. I could see all of the basic forms of my design beginning to take shape. Wow, what a great feeling! Then magically, after waiting 30 minutes, by first print was complete.
These tiny little buttons are part of enclosure that will house the control panel for my light ring for my microscope. I had included some simple text on the button faces, but somehow they got lost in the printing process (not enough height or width on the characters?), but I can figure that out later. This print went so well, that I am now moving on to one of the other pieces in my project (13% of the way through an hour print time).
Lessons learned:
1) I tend to be a little cautious in trying something new and this was the case with getting my printer running. I completed the very simple assembly and was working my way through the setup and alignment procedure, when it became clear that the Z-axis on my printer was not working correctly (noisily stalling when attempting to move away from the home mark). At first, I just shut everything down and attempted to find support (through manufacturer and user groups). I somehow did not feel confident to troubleshooting this new piece of equipment on my own. After a couple of days with no help coming, I started to get a little braver and started to try and understand what might be preventing the Z-axis from moving. I was able to 'help' the move away from home by turning the coupler on the stepper motor. Then I tried greasing the drive screws and manually moving the Z-axis up and down. Then, when it felt like things were moving more freely, I turned the power on and tried the home and move sequence again. Yeah! Things were moving smoothly.
2) After several attempts to jump into fusion and design my pieces (with disastrous results), I decided to follow a couple of tutorials to try and learn the basics of this new tool. That helped, but it did take a while to wrap my head around some of the features and methods of this environment. It took a couple of days until I could drop the shapes where I wanted and edit them to the dimensions that I wanted. I can see that even with the amount of effort that I have expended, I am nothing more that a beginner, but at least I have the first steps and so far I have been rewarded with my first 'printed' object.
This was a frustrating and then rewarding learning exercise. I look forward to more learning and more printing.
Gene
<update>
I finished the rest of the parts on my housing and admit that for a first try, this was an overwhelming success. Here are the design elements for the housing:
And here is a picture of the completed unit:
I have already made some changes to the design and hopefully I will print out a second run tomorrow.
Gene
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