I often catch myself watching a 3D print for several minutes just because the process itself is so interesting. I like taking a closer look at things, so after seeing “chilicoke’s” nozzle camera, that he made for his Voron printer, I had to make one for myself.

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These coat hanger hooks were one of my first practical 3D prints I did years back when I got my first 3D printer and they served us very well. As you might know, we’re currently renovating, which also meant re-painting the staircase railing. The old hooks were fine, though they scratched the paint and also regularly fell off while removing a jacket. For this reason, I thought that it was finally time to create a version 2 of it. I wanted to retain the general shape of the hook because that worked well though I wanted to add a soft padding that touched the railing. This way I could make it fit snuggly so that it’s safer in position and it also doesn’t scratch the paint. I could have just taped some felt on the inside of the old design, but hey, why do I have all of these fancy 3D printers? (That’s at least what my wife tends to ask.)

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Nozzle temperature is the first parameter that you usually set for a filament. Manufacturers often provide a range of temperatures in which the material can be printed. Some just select the middle of that range and print with it but I'm sure most of you have already printed one of the various temperature towers that are available. While printing them, you set different temperatures for each step, which can be, for example, done in PrusaSlicer by inserting the custom GCode M104 S and then the temperature. I usually start at the highest and work my way up to the lowest, because the chance that the print fails is usually higher at low temperatures. Once finished, you select a temperature at which the printing results look the best, with minimum stringing, nice overhangs and bridges and smooth surfaces. But that's just part of the story and before we continue I'd be interested in how you usually select your nozzle temperatures, so post a comment down below!

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Previously, we've already been taking a look at another of Colorfabbs foaming filaments, and that was Light Weight PLA. By printing that material at temperatures of up to 250°C, you can lower its density by almost 60%, giving it a really nice texture and, more importantly, making it well suitable for things like RC airplanes, as, for example, Eclipson perfectly demonstrates.

Colorfabb uses a similar approach and adds a foaming agent, which is in the most simple case baking soda, to TPU. This foaming agent that is finely distributed all over the material is activated at elevated temperatures and releases a gas, for example, CO2, and makes the material foam up in it's molten state. The higher the temperature, the more gas is released; hence you can use the temperature to adjust the material's density. With Light Weight PLA this is used to make the material itself lighter while still preserving some mechanical properties. VarioShore TPU specifically uses the degeneration of mechanical properties when you lower the density. This results in very soft parts on printers that would otherwise not be able to handle flexible filaments, or even printing flexibles faster, because you generate more material volume in the nozzle, and therefore, the extruder doesn't need to work as hard.

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If you ever used a garden trimmer, you might have noticed the trimmer line that's used resembles 3D printing filament closely and is often made from Nylon. Not everyone has a roll of Nylon at home because that's usually quite expensive and often not the easiest to print with. So my question was if trimmer line from the hardware store is a feasible alternative to real 3D printing filament if you, maybe just need it for a small part and don't want to spend half your allowance on a kilogram spool? So, I headed to my local hardware store and found Oregon trimmer line that's even 1.7mm in diameter. The roll with 15m, which is around 42g cost me 2.79€ and if you do the math, you end up not that much more expensive than if you would buy filament, and hey, it's available in your hardware store and you don't need to buy a full spool. There are half and full pound rolls available that are a bit cheaper per kilo. I was quite surprised that the diameter of my Oregon trimmer line was pretty consistent and basically perfectly in the range of what normal 3D printing filament has. Even the product description says that it's made from a Nylon co-polymer that's fortified with additives so it lasts longer and breaks less. Not too bad for mechanical parts, if we're able to print it!

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I have plenty of 3D printers in my home shop, together with a CNC router and even two diode laser engraver. Though one piece of equipment that I wanted to have, is a CO2 laser cutter because it allows you to cut and mark a large variety of materials without a lot of setup and with only minimum mess. For this reason, I was really happy when the company FLUX reached out to me and offered one of their latest CO2 laser cutters for review.

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Remelting 3D prints in salt seems to be the new hype, and I see why. In comparison to my plaster annealing method, you simply embed your 3D prints in salt, put everything in the oven to remelt the plastic and end up with injection-molded strength 3D prints, or do you? After watching my video on plaster annealing, a viewer named "free spirit 1" posted a video on his salt remelting method that he had been working on in the past. Well, and it became kind of viral! In his video, he showed how the process basically works, though I started further investigating it, looking at salt grain sizes, treatment temperatures, dimensional accuracy, and, most importantly, strength. I'll also discuss to pros and cons of using table salt and what alternatives there could be.

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Believe it or not, but this is my first delta 3D printer that I’ve ever used and this is also why I was really excited to get my hand on the FLSUN Q5. A delta printer is mainly different from a classic, cartesian 3D printer due to the way it moves the printhead. In order to move the nozzle to a specific location even only on one axis, all 3 stepper motors need to move the vertical slides in a coordinated manner. This does look very mesmerizing and allows you to move the printhead very quickly, though comes with added computational effort and, in the past often difficult calibration.

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For ages, I’ve been looking for the holy grail of 3D printing, and this is for me, getting 3D prints with a strength similar to injection molded parts. 3D printed materials can be really strong, but most of them show only 50% or less strength if they are loaded perpendicular to the layers. In the past, I tried a couple of methods to improve layer adhesion or fuse the layers together post-printing. Even though some helped a little, none of them showed a significant difference. A couple of tests involved annealing the parts, simply in an oven, submerged in sand or even ABS, internally reinforced with polycarbonate. Annealing usually involves dimensional changes of the parts from either sagging because the prints become soft or the reduction of internal stresses or crystallization. In the comments under one particular video, viewers wanted me to anneal my parts in plaster to minimize warping and even using the closed cast as a mold in which I can re-melt the printed part and fuse the layers together. So this is what I’ve finally been working on

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Of course this is a marketing campaign by Polymaker, though I haven’t been paid for this video and will even participate on my own. Our task is to design the strongest hook with some design restrictions, print three of them in Polymakers PolyMax PLA, and send them to Polymaker until September 25th 2020, who will be then testing them against each other to find a winner. The requirement to print the parts in precisely their material has a strange aftertaste for a competition. Still, I can understand it in a way so that everyone uses the same material and doesn’t have an advantage by using some fancy carbon fiber reinforced filament or whatever. Well, and it’s good for sales… If you don’t have any Polymax PLA or don’t want to buy some or maybe even don’t have a 3D printer, stay until the end of the video where I’ll tell you about a way you could still enter the competition.

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