The 220V AC air pump we bought for about $60 a while back from an aquarium supply shop was horribly inefficient. From basic physics, power is equal to force times speed. For an air pump pumping air into water, you can calculate the force as the difference between air pressure at the pump, and water…
Mystery print: 3D printed boat thruster gearbox
I’ve spent the last week printing and assembling a prototype gearbox made from PLA. If you were curious at all about my mystery print from last weekend, you can see it inside of the gearbox here: The entire gearbox is made up of about 18 different printed pieces totaling about half a kilogram in weight….
Mystery print
Would you care to guess what these things are? I printed up four of these yesterday. I’m not telling what they are yet. Praew thought they looked kinda like a mold for muffin cups. Then again, she made a really good kaffir lime and poppy seed muffin recently, so that probably influenced what she was…
3D printing with wood
The filaments used for 3D printing are all different kinds of plastic. Or are they? Well, they are and they aren’t. Currently, filament type consumer 3D printers can’t handle the temperatures required to melt metals, so we are stuck with different kinds of plastics, but there have been recent developments with different kinds of plastic…
Successful first light test of prototype water pump
We’ve done our first successful test of the prototype water pump with a 3D printed impeller. Here is a photo of it running: Full disclosure: I’ve been quite busy these last two days, so this successful test was done without me. I’ve just been involved remotely via Google hangouts. 🙂Kudos to the team! We haven’t…
Impellers, impellers, and more impellers
Since I first thought of designing my own impeller for a small test pump about a week ago, I have test printed several versions of it. The original print looked like this: You can see the ragged edges caused by Slic3r’s imperfect coverage for source material while it was printing: I decided to remove…
Making a custom propeller/impeller
Since I’ve been exploring various pump options, of course it occurred to me to make one from scratch. I have a pretty cool prototype in the works using a 12.5″ boat propeller as an impeller, cut down to fit inside a 12″ PVC pipe. But that will take a week or two to have anything…
3D Printing With Nylon
Experimenting with nylon as a print material. I’m having good luck with 25mm/sec print speed, 240deg extruder temperature, 80deg bed temperature, 20mm brim, and printing on a glass bed with a glue stick layer.
SlingBot Update: Prototype up on the test cable
Today, we assembled the prototype SlingBot with motor and wheels. Don’t mind the bright red wheel, we are just trying to use up some free PLA that came with a printer on some of these prototype prints. It isn’t some new design sense I have. This new design seems to sit well on the sling…
SlingBot Update: Basic parts printed
Ran prints all day yesterday and overnight, too. 3D printing is now done for the main pieces of the SlingBot prototype. In the picture, you can see two wheel struts and the main center motor and wheel mount piece. Each of the 3 pieces took 3-7 hours to print. (Yes, 3D printing on my machine…
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