• Progress on Prints and design changes

    Mitchell O'Connor • 01/26/2020 at 05:30 • 0 comments

    This is about the top third of the rocket with the nosecone screwed into the payload bay and the parachute bay slid onto the bottom of that. These sections fit quite nicely together with minimal finishing.

    I had to reprint the payload section to add clearance to the threads, this was my first time working with printed threads so I just kinda guessed that .01 in was enough to be smooth And it only took a little sanding for it to work fine.

    Moving onto the fins I ran into a few problems, both with surface finish and with the parts warping. The surface finish issues are very visible of the part that I started sanding on (they are rather deep into the part). The finish alone is enough for me to have to reprint the parts, but the fins also developed a warp on the bottom mounting surface that makes them unusable. Both of these issues are probably due to my trying to print all of them in one batch. But we shall see if they are any better. 

    This shot shows the warping of the parts pretty clearly, they are attached to the fin can / thrust structure.

    That's about as far as I've gotten, in the next update I'll try to get into the selection of the actual rocketry parts that will make it fly!

  • Starting on test part printing

    Mitchell O'Connor • 12/01/2019 at 17:30 • 0 comments

    Getting started on printing some if the parts I was most concerned about. 

    One of the concerns I had was printing threads on one of the parts, basically I wanted to have the nosecone screw onto the payload section because there isn't enough space for screws.

    this is printing at .2mm layer height in PETG. Overall pretty good! Definitely needs some finishing work because I neglected to design in any clearence.