It’s hard to pass up another lesson in good machine design brought to us by [Mark Rehorst]. This time, [Mark] combats the relentless forces of bed deformation due to thermal expansion.

Did you think your printer stayed the same size when it heated up? Well, think again! According to [Mark’s] calculations, when heated, the bed can expand by as much as half a millimeter in the x/y direction. While x/y deformation seems like something we can ignore, that’s not always true. If our bed is rigidly fixed in place, then that change in dimension will only result in a warped bed as it tries to make space for itself.

Don’t give up yet though.

This looks to be a 3D-printable tenting kit for an ErgoDox.

printing surface

How to paint 3D printed objects

Process for painting 3D models

Tips on painting 3D printed objects

Tips on painting 3D printed objects

Nice blog post providing an overview of Design Thinking.

This research has lead to the creation of an online tool that allows you to plug in the variables for your desired spring (pitch, radius, revolutions, etc), as well as details about your printer such as nozzle diameter and temperature. The result is a custom GCode that (hopefully) will produce the desired spring when loaded up on your printer.

But as you might expect, with such power comes a considerable learning curve. OpenSCAD devotee [Uri Shaked] recently wrote in to share with us his workflow for designing complex interacting mechanisms, which serves as an excellent primer to the world of parametric design. From animating your models to recreating the “vitamins” of your build, his post contains plenty of tips that can help both new and veteran OpenSCAD users alike.

3D models drawn in Blender work great in a computer animated virtual world but don’t always when brought into a slicer for 3D printing. Slicers require something which makes sense in the real world. And the real world is far less forgiving, as I’ve found out with my own projects which use 3D printed parts.

Our [Brian Benchoff] already talked about making parts in Blender with his two-part series (here and here) so consider this the next step. These are the techniques I’ve come up with for preparing parts for 3D printing before handing them off to a slicer program.