@MalcTheOracle Spot the Lack in here - may look a bit flimsy - but working out pretty well so far for me for the last few months.
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Making some progress with incorporating the melted flat sheets into my ‘purge block’
system.
Plus some smaller stand alone brackets - for making things like boxes etc.
Quite pleased with the little 3d printed grub screws.
Test prints in solid colours - but will eventually start creating them as flush-into ‘purge blocks’
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Mini Purge Block / Melted sheet table. Design needs a bit of work - and parts need to be proper purge blocks - rather than just waste old filament - but quite pleased with it anyway
Lots more sheets left
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Ready to start Britannia printing.
Without flush objects - Flush ratio about 110% - print time 18h17m
With lots of flush objects - print time up by 9h28m to 27h45m, but flush ratio down to less than 5%
Print time for flush objects by themselves would be 11h40m - so also a couple of hours total print time saving.
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Is there a way to utilize print by object instead of print by layer to manage the waste? It would be preferable ensure proper clearance to print a separate object (or group of objects) of Exactly 109 g in the ship example to printing an additional 169 g of material to recover the 109 g.
This would create challenges with ensuring proper print head clearance but I would think it would be more efficient provided the gcode can be adjusted to create a safe path to where the last object layer where printing was paused.
Yes it would certainly be technically possible to reduce the number of purge objects by allowing the print head to up or down a few layers when doing the purge objects, and this would reduce the total print time down possibly to close to the time it would take to do normal off bed purge.
My focus so far has been mainly on keeping things as standard as possible - but I do agree that the substantial increases in print time that are often needed to save the purge are difficult for many people to accept.
indeed I have recently myself done quite a few standard prints without flush objects, as the waste is less of an issue to me now that I have the melted flat sheet solution.
I think a good way of approaching this is to do some GCODE analysis of for example the most recent print I did, to see whether it would be possible to post process it and automatically remove one or more whole flush objects by introducing a degree of Z axis freedom when creating the other flush objects.
I think it should be possible to include within the logic intelligence to avoid the head clashing with objects already printed.
I am in the early stages of working on something similar related to avoiding head clashes when doing parallel printing using multiple fully independent print heads trying to print in parallel on the same fixed print bed.
I am thinking that some sort of Blender addin might be able to help with this - as its possible within Blender to model the precise structure of the print head, rails, movement and print as it grows up - so that you can then check that any paths generated to do clash with the print or other print heads.
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Nice haul of extra table parts - and only 8g of waste (BS estimate 5.85), or total of 21g including slightly messy prime tower.
interestingly I didn’t get any purge shoot build ups with the 27hr print spread over about 45hrs.
One part failed slightly near the end (on near the prime tower), and unfortunately due to a design mistake with supports the actual multi coloured print isn’t good enough for release.
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Table top made of full flush-blocks (rather than waste filament) plus Micheal Laws (Teaching Tech) flat sheets (out of flush spirals) now complete - I like the look of the contrasting patterns.
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Will you leave these looking like an acid trip or do you intend to paint them?
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No I like the colouring of the flush-block parts. I am however planning to try printing directly onto the flat sheets at some point - so I could I suppose cover up the colours with a couple of layers to flatten them out which would also mostly hide the colours on the less attractive sheets.
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