Follow up nGen filament question

So great news, I’ll be getting my Taz 6 on Friday. So of course I’m taking the day off to unbox and start printing. From my earlier post I found that I should be using the General Purpose Elmer’s glue stick (which I now have) and am deciding which files to run through the printer first. I will be printing files that I’ve obtained off this kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/printablescenery/time-warp-rampage-castle-europe-and-the-americas?ref=user_menu and was wondering if there were any tips that would be helpful for me when I start printing these.

Regards,

Dirk

Those are amazing models. I’d recommend starting with a few more basic files just for practice. A few with thin walls, a few with overhangs.

Depending on the temperature in your area, you might consider building a foam board enclosure to keep some of the heat in around your printer. I did my first nGen print around this time last year and it was exceptionally brittle. I emailed lulzbot and they said it was likely ambient heat issue. The enclosure fixed that problem.

Howdy Dsplawski,

Great advice. The room I’ll be setting the printer up in is a bit colder than the rest of the house and winter is coming. I have a lot of foam board on hand so I should be able to whip something up. Actually I was thinking of drawing up some files for foam board clips to make boxes out of foam board. If you could post a picture of the enclosure you’ve made that’d be awesome. Also I noticed that there was a separate enclosure for the 6 available on the store page here. Did you think that would make a decent thermal insulator?

Also I have a set of much simpler gaming pieces that I was going to print to send to my older boy who’s in a dorm and doesn’t have a lot of space so I could print those first to get my feet wet.

Best Regards,

Dirk

Oh ya, the enclosure I was looking at was this one: https://www.lulzbot.com/store/parts/lulzbot-taz-6-enclosure-printed-solid

  • Dirk

I’ll post a picture when I get home. It’s a Lulzbot mini so there will be a few differences in the shape but the general design is very similar to the printed solid enclosures that they sell (for way too much money) on the website. I don’t think the r-value of the material matters too much, it’s just nice to keep some of the warm air generated by the heated bed close to the work piece. When I’m printing ABS I use a hair dryer to pre-heat the chamber while the printer is doing it’s calibration cycle. That works exceptionally well.

A few months ago our local library almost bought a taz 6 and I was in the process of designing an enclosure for it. I was thinking something like the picture below. The blue parts would be walls and the green part would be a cool air access for the z axis and x axis motor. This isn’t super important for the home gamer, but if I were designing a proper enclosure I’d certainly include some cooling for the motors.