Tag: heart

Music to Soothe the Savage 3D Printer

May 12, 2021 / admin3dorcs / 0 Comments

A Long Haul

It’s taken us two months, dozens of test prints, and several design reviews with the buyer, but we’ve finally finished the Jankó keyboard project that we started back in March!

But First an Apology

This week’s blog post is a bit late. Sorry about that! I got my second COVID vaccine shot (Moderna) on Saturday and it really wiped me out. Thankfully there was nothing super urgent to do for 3D Orcs, so I was able to take it easy and let my body recover from producing a bunch of very welcome antibodies. I’m now nearly back to normal, with just a sore arm left to tolerate.

Well, I guess I’m still tiring easily too, so today’s post will be on the short side.

The Final Stages of Jankó

Once we were finally happy with the key design, we still had a lot of printing to do.

Here’s the keyboard with most of the original keys, and just our few test keys installed at one end. But there are several new keys ready to go!

Because the Jankó keycaps overlap neighboring keys, they need to be installed in order from one end, so all of the original keys had to be removed first.

Here we’ve started installing the new keys. It was fun to see the offset black/white pattern start to emerge!

Getting close!

All keys installed!

It was awesome to see it all come together after so much work! But the best part was yet to come.

The Completed Jankó Keyboard!

Finally! Fully assembled and operational!

It’s very cool to see our 3D printed products incorporated into an actual functioning electronic device! And the customer is very happy and excited to learn to play it!

In Other News

One of the last things I did before my COVID shot wiped me out was play a game of Ticket to Ride – Europe. Like the last time I wrote about this game, we used several of our custom game pieces, making for a very eclectic board appearance!

This time I used green canoes from the Camping themed set, my wife used a set of black Christmas sleighs, my father-in-law used purple Steampunk roadsters, and my mother-in-law used the yellow heart themed set we gave her for Mothers Day.

Did you notice her spiral heart Train Stations? Those are new! So new, they’re not even listed as an option in Etsy yet!

Pursuing B2B

Aside from adding the spiral heart Train Stations, this week we’ll be turning our attention to exploring some B2B (business to business) opportunities. We want to see if some local small businesses are interested in buying 3D printed versions of their company logos, whether for their staff or their customers. Wish us luck!

Beyond Game Pieces

February 1, 2021 / admin3dorcs / 0 Comments

New Directions

As we indicated last week, our promised new releases took us out of the realm of board game pieces. We ventured into two entirely new areas: jewelry and drink coasters! Read more about them below, but first I’m going to tell you about fixing the heat creep blockage we also mentioned last week.

The Blockage Got Worse

When I wrote about it last week we had a workaround for temporarily dealing with the blockage. But then the problem got worse. While we could still get some filament through, it wasn’t enough. We were facing pretty bad under-extrusion problems, where not enough filament was getting through the nozzle, leaving the print with gaps, thin layers, and poor adhesion. We ended up needing to stop all printing for a day and a half.

Digging Into the Problem

Then our supplies arrived and I began disassembling the printer’s hot end (what you might think of as the print head on a traditional printer). Here you see it opened up and laid out for inspection. Even to get to this point I had to disengage it from the X-axis drive belt, and remove two of the wheels and the print cooling fan. The problem is somewhere between where the Bowden tube (the white tube at the top) enters, and the nozzle (the pointy metal bit at the lower left of the assembly).

Isolating the Problem Area

Next I removed the back panel (with the remaining wheel) from the heat dissipation block (the central black thing with the fins for air cooling), and unscrewed the Bowden tube connector. You can also see a glob of melted and burnt filament plastic on top of the rectangular heating block that the nozzle is screwed into. But to go any further I had to turn on the printer and heat it up. Everything was fused together by solidified printing plastic, and it had to be softened before I could do anything else.

Smokin’ Hot! Literally!

Once it was heated I was able to pull that piece of plastic off the top of the heating block.

I also removed the nozzle and confirmed that the blockage was higher than that.

The Bowden tube itself was really stuck hard in there! I had to hold the heat dissipation block with pliers and pull hard on the tube to get it out, all while being very aware that I was dealing with parts heated to 235ºC (455ºF).

When it finally came out, it was blackened and smoking! Unfortunately the smoke dissipated before I could snap a pic of it, but here you can see the blackened end of the Bowden tube. It smelled faintly sweet, which makes sense I guess considering PLA is made from corn starch.

The Solution

While the root cause of the problem is still just an educated guess (as I speculated last week, I think it came from operating the printer very hot for the metallic filament), the immediate problem was clear. The end of the Bowden tube was completely blocked with burned filament. Since I had already purchased a new one, I just had to cut it to length and install it. I was grateful to not have to remove the heat break (the metal connection between the heater block and the heat dissipation block), though I did clean out the inside of it with a pipe cleaner. (A real pipe cleaner, not the colored ones that kids use for crafts as that would have melted.)

Here it is with the new Bowden tube installed (this one is blue) and the nozzle back in place.

As I put it all back together, I also cleaned it up and tightened some screws that had become slightly loosened.

Better Than Ever!

Here it is printing some heart trains from our Valentine Ticket to Ride set. They came out beautifully and the printer is working better than ever! I love our new Capricorn Bowden tube! My research showed it was the best brand on the market, and I have to agree.

Valentine Earrings

With that major problem out of the way, we could move ahead with our releases for the week, starting with some Valentine earrings! Our first jewelry offering looks stunning! They come in two styles:

Double Heart

and Cascade Heart.

There are six unique pairs in each style, including several featuring our new metallic filament. Follow the links to our Etsy shop to see them all.

Catan Coasters – With Puns!

We also launched our first set of drink coasters.

They’re themed to match the five resources from Settlers of Catan and would be perfect to use when hosting game night!

Each hex-shaped coaster is colored to match a resource, has cute little icons around the edges, and features a related pun. The set also comes with a tray to store or display them!

Next Up – A Whole New Game!

The project we’re currently working on gets back to game pieces, but they’re for a game we haven’t worked on before. Whether or not you’re a fan of the game, we guarantee it’s one you’ve heard of! Come back in a week to see if we’ve launched it!

Spreading the Love

January 25, 2021 / admin3dorcs / 1 Comment

Two New Valentine Sets

Last week we announced our Valentine-themed Catan set. Since then we’ve launched Valentine-themed sets for Ticket to Ride

and Seafarers of Catan.

The game boards look wonderful with hearts spread all across them! Will these sets be as popular as our Christmas sets (Settlers, Seafarers, and Ticket to Ride)? Time will tell!

More Valentine Items to Come

Last week we mentioned that we’re also working on some non-gaming items. For reasons unrelated to 3D printing they’re not quite ready to go, so we’re saving them for one more week. For now we can tell you that they’re related to Valentine’s Day and will still be available early enough to order, ship, and arrive before February 14.

Metallic Filament

A couple weeks ago we told you that we had acquired some fun new filament. We’ve been playing with metallic gold and silver, and they look great!

But they’re very finicky to work with, resulting in many failed prints. Even a relatively minor glitch like this one puts an unattractive mark across the shiny surface.

We haven’t decided how to include these in our Etsy shop yet. We’re sure our customers will love them, but we want to be certain we can deliver and we haven’t yet got it to a point that it’s reliable enough.

Wood Filament

We also bought some filament with actual wood fibers infused into the PLA plastic. It’s supposed to make prints look like actual wood, and we were excited to try it! But it turned out to be even more finicky than the metallic colors, and just looked beige, not particularly like wood.

So we returned it. We may try another brand at some point, but for now wood filament is off our agenda.

Heat Creep Blockage

We’ve talked here before about clogged nozzles. It’s been a periodic problem, but one we’ve learned to deal with quickly and effectively. This week though we’ve discovered a new kind of blockage. This one seems to be caused by something called “heat creep”, which is when the heat that melts the plastic filament at the nozzle moves up too high and melts plastic further away from where it’s supposed to. That plastic then solidifies into a clumped mass that new filament can’t pass through.

The result is a clog that can’t be corrected by clearing or replacing the nozzle. When it happens mid-print, the filament simply stops extruding, leaving a half finished print like this Ticket to Ride train.

Caused by Our New Filament?

We suspect this happened because of our new metallic filament, which needs to be extruded at a much higher temperature than our usual filament. It’s likely the heat creep happened then, while the printer was operating at a higher temperature than normal, causing a blockage that’s now interfering with our regular printing. Which means this is yet another reason that we’re not yet officially launching our metallic colors.

For now, we’ve got a temporary workaround, and supplies are on the way that will let us disassemble, clean out, and reassemble the entire hot end.

Development Continues

We’re not letting that problem slow us down though. We’re putting the finishing touches on the Valentine mystery items mentioned above, and also working on another new product. This one is related to one of our favorite board games, but is not a new set of game pieces. With luck, it’ll be ready to launch within the next week too!

Canoes and Tents and Snakes, Oh My!

January 19, 2021 / admin3dorcs / 0 Comments

Paddle Across the Countryside

As promised, we’ve expanded our new Camping theme in a couple of fun directions! First up was Ticket to Ride. We added a canoe as the main piece for this set, to replace the standard train cars. It also gets a tent scoring marker, and all looks wonderful on the game board!

Why Did it Have to be Snakes?!

Next we ported (or portaged!) the canoe over to join our other Catan pieces for the Seafarers expansion. We wanted a suitable pirate piece as a bonus item, and decided on a snake. Don’t let his cute look fool you – he’ll still bring your shipping route to a dead stop!

There’s Something in the Air

As we approach Valentine’s Day we thought a themed set would be fun, but the “something” in the air wasn’t love, it was water. At first we weren’t sure why several of our 3D prints were failing.

After attempting many unsuccessful remedies, we discovered that some of our spools of filament had absorbed too much moisture from the air, even though we always store them in ziplock bags with silica gel packets. They look and feel exactly the same, but they behave differently when heated and extruded in a 3D printer. Fortunately it’s not terribly difficult to dry them out. There are commercial filament dryers available, but instead we added a makeshift cardboard extender to our food dehydrator, and voila – dry filament!

We had to monitor the temperature carefully of course, because if it got too warm in there the filament strands would melt together and we’d have been left with an unusable mass of plastic.

Broken Bowden Tube

With the filament in good shape again, our printer decided to thwart us with a problem of its own. The Bowden tube is what guides the filament from the filament drive gear to the hot end where it gets extruded. Ours is the white tube in this picture. And one day in the middle of what would have been a successful print, it decided to break off inside the connector shown by the arrow. (We suspect it had endured some undue stresses over the past few months while correcting other problems.)

We were lucky that the break was so near the end, and the remaining tube was still long enough. I trimmed the end to even it off, and reinserted it. We were back in business, though we did order a new one to have on hand in case it happens again. If it breaks again, the current tube probably won’t be long enough to keep using it.

Feeling the Love!

Finally we were able to print enough of our new pieces to launch our Valentine-themed Catan set!

With that much love on the board, how could anyone steal your Longest Road?

More Valentines On the Way

In the coming week we plan to launch more Valentine-themed sets, and we’re also venturing into a whole new area that has nothing to do with board games. Intrigued? Come back next Monday to see what we mean!