[UPDATE 10/21/2021 -After 2018 I started posting my updates on my Patreon page, and so I'm filling in the back-logs for this project retroactively so the whole story is in both places. You can also read all of these posts with their original photo formatting here]

August 31st, 2019

Hello Patrons! Let me tell you how I spent your money this month! I spent most of August building a new gantry with a MUCH larger print area, getting it moving, and dialing in the settings. I was actually really surprised how quickly it all went together- the first gantry took me about 11 months to get working, this one only took me about 2 weeks!

So most of my budget this month went to buying little things like lead screws, shaft couplers, and various other parts. The printer is now printing better (and larger!) than ever, but I've pretty much reached the limit of what the motor I'm using can handle, and without more speed and more torque, I can only extrude so fast, which limits how fast I can print and how fat and consistent the layers can be.

So I bought a neat little board called a "Tarocco Board" that acts as a controller that reads the step/direction pulses coming from the 3D printer board, and translates them to control a brushless DC gear motor- the same kind of motor used in cordless drills. These motors are much more powerful for the same size and weight (and much cheaper!) and I'm hoping this improvement will make a big difference in speed and consistency of the extrusion.

I also bought a bed-leveling sensor, so that I can account for warp in the table, although all in all, the new table design is much smoother than the old one, and variations are kept to within +/- 1mm, but still, getting that down to fractions of a millimeter will make a big difference for adhesion and consistency of the prints.

The whole setup I'm using to do this, only costs around $600 to build! Next month, I'm going to focus on bed leveling, and building a new extruder with a more powerful motor, and see if that gets me any closer to printing a surfboard!

Come check out the TrashPrinter in action at the Portland Mini Maker Faire next weekend at OMSI!

Stay tuned, and thank you for your support!

-Sam

Here is an itemized run down of how I spent this months budget:

$85 - HDPE 6' Folding Table 

$6.55 - 2x Flexible Shaft Couplers 

$7- 6mm-8mm coupler for gear motor

$12.99- 300rpm 24V Brushed DC gearmotor

$25.38 - 2x 400m T8 Leadscrews and nuts 

$11.99 - Silicone Gaskets 

$15.99 - 2” Tri-clamps 

$27- 2x 6’ Aluminum L-bars 

$55- Tarocco Board 

$10- 3/8” Auger