Projects.

I have several projects that I am looking forward to getting my teeth into and getting the 3-D printer up and running again. Firstly I've got a lot of work to do on the printer maintenance wise, during the technology projects I jammed up the primary printer head with nylon which I think has denatured and carbonising formed a solid block inside the head. After cleaning that out, some of the wiring around the printheads has become loose which needs attention to have reliable printing. Then I'm going to work on maximising the precision of the 3-D printer aiming for 40 µm resolution and 0.05 mm layer thickness, using a series of complex test prints with peculiar curved shapes and high detail to really push the performance of the printer. To give a comparison the Makerbot replicator, a commercial product, has a precision of 100 µm, which I am aiming to surpass. 

I have another few smaller projects I didn't quite finish over Christmas which I'm going to work on before starting some big projects which I've been looking forward to for a long time. 

The first project is to enter some of the Makerbot STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Maths) challenges. You can check them out here: http://www.thingiverse.com/challenges/  I will have future blog posts showing my entries. 

The next project is to build a 3-D scanner. I backed a 3-D scanning project on Kickstarter called Atlas 3-D. It was successfully funded in February and I am looking forward to the delivery of the electrical components sometime in July to build the scanner. The parts include the stepper motor, wiring and lasers and then I will use a Rasberry Pi and Rasberry Pi camera and print of the other components to assemble a DIY style Open source 3-D scanner. The 3-D scanner will run on Open source software, which I have been following the development of, called FreeLSS. (https://github.com/hairu/freelss)

I then will be designing and 3-D printing a range of small models of classic commercial vehicles, in 1/50 scale. I have collected vintage vehicle models for some years and I am going to develop my own models of vehicles and trailers which are not available as commercial models. 

So it's going to be a busy summer holidays.