Quote:
Originally Posted by bigdogrod
excellent work, what printer, material, and fill did you use?
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Thanks. I printed everything with a Lulzbot TAZ 6 printer using a material called nGen. nGen is a co-polyester made by a company called colorFabb. I really like it. Its as strong if not stronger than ABS, doesn't stink like ABS and doesn't shrink like ABS. Requires a heated bed but only to 80-85 degrees instead of the 110 or so needed with ABS. Except for specialty prints, its about the only plastic I use anymore.
I sliced the parts with Lulzbots edition of CURA. The gooseneck and rear end were sliced at 0.3mm layer heights using a 20% infill. I chose those values based primarily on printing time. The gooseneck took about 19.5 hours and the rear end took a bit over 17 hours to print. I played around with different setting in CURA and was amazed at some of the printing times it was estimating. If I had printed at 100% infill the print time for the gooseneck alone would have been over 57 hours! It would have also used up over half of a spool of plastic.
I realize that using only 20% infill may be part of the reason the neck is flexing as much as I noted in my original post. But based on my experience with nGen I was pretty confident that 20% would provide enough strength for my purposes. But while more infill might have made the parts a bit stiffer, you get diminishing returns with adding more plastic. I did do additional testing on the gooseneck besides the test shown and am very satisfied as to it's strength for my purposes. And I do believe that without a major increase in the overall size of the parts, which would really detract from their appearance, that even at 100% infill you won't be able to build a lowboy trailer like this that will handle the weight of say a full metal D11.