User:Tantoniak
Introduction
Hello my name is Thomas Antoniak and I'm a senior at Penn State majoring in Mechanical Engineering.
My career aspiration is to do research, design, or product and development work.
I am currently taking a class called Edsign 497J so I can learn as much about 3D printing and the printers themselves as I can.
I will be posting blogs pertaining to the class and the work I've done in and outside of class.
Blog 1
9/14 - I have learned a lot so far in the past weeks trying to make an extruder for the blue & white printer. So far, the biggest concern with this printer is the extruder that is missing from the machine. First, I tried to make my own out of a current extruder. I added wires from the heat source to the metal tip. After testing this, the wires did not hold up and the metal tip did not get hot.
Blog 2
9/21 - Recently, I added the wires via soldering the new wires to the ends of the old wires that were on the extruder before. The solder did not hold and a new plan needed to be implemented. I then re-taped the wires tightly with kevlar tape to hold in the heat on the metal surfaces. This worked and the tip reached over 100 degrees Celsius except the thermo-couple did not have consistently accurate readings and started to read error messages. Next, I removed the cement from the tip and wrapped the wires directly to see if that would work. The same heating followed by error messages occurred again.
Blog 3
10/1 - After learning a lot, my new tactic was that I sanded the final chips of cement off of the tip and wrapped the special coated wire that did not oxidize and attached this wire to the energy port wires with the thermo-couple. The best results occurred until more inconsistent readings of temperature. This is most likely due to the atmosphere cooling the tip and fluctuating the temperature reading. What has been learned over these past few weeks is how sensitive the heat tips are and the importance of materials used to trap heat in and not melt. Every part must be included and without cement to finish this heat tip, the part will not be fixed.
Blog 4
10/9 - The heat tip is almost finished. The final lesson learned today was that the heat source wires must be soldered in order to hold together the bond to the heating wire that wraps around. Being able to tuck the thermocouple wire underneath the wrapping wire allows all of the wiring to hold tight and not fall out. After taping the wire ends to the bottom of the heat source away from the tip, the wire is ready to be caulked. Lastly, wrapping the nycrhome wires starting with the middle of the wire and ending at the ends allow the wires to wrap evenly and be able to caulk most efficiently.
Blog 5
10/16 - After the heat tip wiring melted to the tip, the caulk had to be removed. The next time, I re-wrapped the tip with new wiring and realized that the thermo-couple reading was having issues. It turns out that there was a small part of the thermo-couple wiring sticking out and I needed to add more caulk to completely insulate it. I then connected the wires to the printer and set the heat value to 50 degrees. I kept increasing by 5 degrees until the outside caulk went from wet to solid. There was white smoke but that was normal. The heat tip should now be ready to use.
