Share Your 3D-Printed Creations!

[SelectHalfling0]

After finding a lack of 3-D printing threads on this forum (apart from Eucl3d), and wanting to show everyone a print I just made, I decided to create a 3D Printing Megathread! Eucl3d prints, as well as personal ones are welcome! I personally only know a little about 3D printers, however feel free to discuss anything with 3D printing as well.

To kick things off, here is a Tiger Tank I just printed on a Makergear 2 (not mine, it belongs to a friend). It is 10 cm long and printed in 4 hours. I plan on painting it with acrylic paint soon (tm).

Edited September 24, 2016 by SelectHalfling0

[njmksr]

Nice! I made a Pokéball but I'm too lazy to take a picture.

[Nuke]

one of the first things i did when i got my 3d printer was to print a bunch of ducted fans.

i started with the medium size one. its not great but it does work. then i tried shrinking it down, turns out i had another motor with the same proportions, just smaller, so with little modification i was able to scale it down. neither fan has a whole lot of force. then i built the big one. this thing is using a motor from an old foamy kit that i had. i had replaced the motor with a brushless and had this one in my parts bin for a very long time. rather than scaling up the old fan, i remodeled it from scratch. its a beast, its almost powerful enough to self-hover. i even printed a nacelle cover for it so it looks nice. a lot of people do snap together parts, but i find i can make things more compact with a few well placed screw holes. so the motor and the nacelle cover are both bolted it. the only design flaw is that the blades arent, and if you run the fan too long the plastic will heat up enough where the blades self launch themselves. i could also come down on the wall thickness and infill to reduce its wait, its abit heavy to use in an aircraft.

and who doesnt print a psu case when they move up to a heated bed and need more power for their scrap atx supply. in my case i just opted to print a snap on cap to hide the wiring, and theres a nice little toggle switch to turn on the supply. this is very useful if you need to shut down the printer in an emergency, like when your print head starts scraping kapton or slamming into your print (both of which have happened since i added the switch).

those ducted fans i printed made me think hovercraft. i printed a squirrel cage lift fan which bolts directly to a brushless motor, but its inside a cardboard prototype and i dont want to rip it apart to show you. needless to say it was as good as one of those hovering hockey pucks you sometimes see. this got me to think about propulsion. i didnt have money to spend on any more motors and speed controllers so i needed to use what i had on hand. what i had on hand was a broke tail assembly for an rc heli, some servos, a lot of weak motors, and a one way speed controller for a dc motor. enough to build a variable pitch system, which i intended on mounting atop a rotating mast. so this is one of my more complex prints, i had to accommodate a lot of other pre-existing parts and it took a lot of measurements with the calipers.

i didnt have any more powerful motors, so i thought what if i rewind one of these smaller motors with thicker magnet wire, thats always a good way to trade efficiency for performance. this worked, for about 3 minutes, and then the brushes melted. i foresaw problems like this and made the motor mount replacable incase i needed to make a new one for a different motor. but ive yet to get adequate resutlts from any of the other motors. i made other mistakes too, like the linkage points on my blades. those blades were an excersize in futility, i used a symmetrical airfoil, which turns out is terrible for a fan. the place where the pitch linkage connects is too far away from the center, why you should never confuse diameter and radius (i totally should have know better), but it could have just been something stupid like not zeroing my calipers before taking a measurement.

i grossly underestimated the amount the shaft would slide in the berings, and a really dumb mistake is not making room for any kind of stops to keep it from sliding. so rather than pitching the blades, you end up with the shaft sliding through the berings and the blades not pitching. final fail was with the gear ratio. i really should have printed some gears instead of using existing ones out of my parts bin. it should be 1:1 or a slightly higher ratio rather than the high torque config that i am using. needless to say the whole assembly turned out to be as useless as it is impressive.

most recently i printed a case for this simple 2 axis 1 button joystick. the joystick has an i2c interface which plugs into the header on a raspberry pi. its based around an attiny85 micro controller. which provides analog, and button inputs, and an i2c output. i even went through the trouble of writing a linux driver for the thing. i used it in the raspi ports of d1x/d2x rebirth. for once i spent more time on the software side than the hardware, since the hardware is just a bunch of ugly radio shack strip board, a socket, a few passives, and a psp joystick module (which are terrible, avoid like the plague). does it work well, no. to be fair i might be able to add better calibration routines in the firmware and use a better joystick modules. like those ps2 type thumbsticks which have flooded the market. they arent great (huge dead zone) but they are cheap and a copule steps up from these psp sticks.

 

[pTrevTrevs]

3D printed helicopter I made a few years ago. I designed it myself in Autodesk Inventor and printed it using a MakerBot printer. I made two, the other one is in my Engineering class as a demonstration piece for the printing equipment.

Edited September 27, 2016 by pTrevTrevs
Embedded image for convenience

[TheGuyNamedAlan]

On 27/09/2016 at 7:22 AM, pTrevTrevs said:

3D printed helicopter I made a few years ago. I designed it myself in Autodesk Inventor and printed it using a MakerBot printer. I made two, the other one is in my Engineering class as a demonstration piece for the printing equipment.

That's so cool!!

[Nuke]

lol i just noticed the iron maiden quote i etched into my table one day when i was bored. some of it got into the shot. lol.

[ZooNamedGames]

Thanks to @Eucl3D.