I haven't printed photographic parts specifically yet, but I've printed all types of dodads and useful things that I use around the house. I use an Ender 3. I paid $150 for and makes good enough prints for me.
I've just about made up my mind to follow the path Donald suggests, with the Ender 3. Glass bed - noted. Are there any other necessary upgrades you'd recommend for printing proto-gears, in particular? FreeCAD seems like a workable bit of software, for my purposes. Eventualy, I'll seek out one of VincelnMT's "guys on ebay", or other printing house, to print in nylon.If you're going to do much of this, it makes economic sense to buy a low-end filament printer (under $200) and apply a couple basic upgrades (glass bed surface is IMO the most important one you can't print for yourself). My Ender 3 (not the Pro or 2.0) has long since paid for itself in parts I either couldn't buy at a reasonable price, or couldn't buy at all because I had to design them myself.
That's very helpful - thank you Donald.Might want to get a few packs of replacement nozzles in the original 0.4 mm size as well as 0.2 and 0.6. Prints are a lot faster with the bigger nozzle (and slicer settings adjusted for it) but you can get a lot smoother and more precise parts (at the cost of taking longer) with the fine nozzle. I'd suggest an inexpensive set of hex-drive metric sockets that cover 6-10 mm as well; don't need a driver, you can print one that looks like a knurled knob. It makes changing nozzles vastly easier. Spray bottle for 91% isopropyl. An aerosol package of PTFE super lube (for lubing the Z-axis screw). A small box of paper clamps, one size bigger than the ones that come with the Ender 3 (the originals won't quite hold the 4 mm thick glass).
Also, get the blue PTFE Bowden tube upgrade package -- not to replace the main tube (it's fine), but to cut a small piece to install in the hot end. Look up "ender 3 hot end upgrade ptfe" on YouTube to see what I'm talking about; it virtually eliminates filament material clogging between the end of the stock tube setup and the nozzle.
Any Ender 3 you buy now will have the 32-bit motherboard, and the firmware will include thermal runaway detection, so you don't need to worry about that as an upgrade. You might want to get a couple spare microSD storage cards -- they're easy to lose and can become write locked, requiring you to reformat. And make a copy of the microSD to your hard disk as soon as you unbox; there were files on mine (test print .stl files) that I couldn't download from the Creality site when I had to reformat my microSD.
Luckless, I hadn't thought of that. It might be worth making a jig if my future held a need for more than one gear project, which I don't think it does. Which I hope it doesn't.3D printed gears can work 'mostly okay', but if you're aiming to do any amount of projects that need quality gears then I think it is worth investing the time into building a gear cutting jig. Additive processes are great for a whole host of things, but small high stress precision parts are not really one of them. And you don't need a huge machine shop setup if all you're working with are small gears and such in low production volumes.
Excellent idea!One way you might be able to make your own enlarger gears is to 3D print a mold and then cast the gears from a slightly flexible resin or epoxy formula. This would likely require smoothing the mold (to fill in the layer lines), which would in turn require printing with an allowance for the thickness of the smoothing material (since PLA can't be solvent smoothed the way ABS can -- and I don't recommend ABS for anything at this time).
A 3D printer isn't really a single tool offering the same basic solution to all problems - "3D printer > Prints Finished Part" as an analogue to "Hammer > Drive in a Nail" - but rather it becomes kind of a tool box of solution potentials.
Another good tip - thanks.Oh, one more thing to know -- a 3D print is only rarely liquid tight unless printed in "vase mode" -- but there's nothing to prevent printing your mold in vase mode, then reinforcing it on the outside with plaster or similar so it holds shape when filled. If you need to pour more than one part, you could even print two mold halves with alignment pins.
3D printed gears can work 'mostly okay', but if you're aiming to do any amount of projects that need quality gears then I think it is worth investing the time into building a gear cutting jig. Additive processes are great for a whole host of things, but small high stress precision parts are not really one of them. And you don't need a huge machine shop setup if all you're working with are small gears and such in low production volumes.
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