A few weeks back I was contacted by Afinia about doing a phone interview. I’d been sending them photos of my work with their printer and they really seemed to like what I was doing. They are not averse to posting my pics on facebook and other social media.

Here is the result of that interview:

Veteran of Design Puts Afinia 3D Printer to the Test with Detailed Prints

The Afinia H479 comes equipped with a good set of basic tools:

1 – A reel of Premium White filament.
2, 3, 4 – Power supply, power cord, USB cable (I list these together because they are essential parts of the printer, not extra tools)
5 – 3 perf-boards – these are what you clip to the print bed to print on
6 – 6 clips – these clip the perf-board to the print bed
7 – Filament tube – (this doesn’t scan well in the photo) It is a channel for the filament to go through when extruding. It helps keep the filament on a good angle while printing
8 – Spool holder (also doesn’t show well in the photo) This is good only for Afinia Premium reels. (More on this later)
9 – Nozzle wrench – this is for removing the extruder nozzle if it becomes clogged or needs a cleaning
10 – Set of three Allen Keys – for removing the various bolts used on the Afinia
11 – Set of replacement screws in case any go missing
12 – Heat-resistant gloves – 3D printing is a hot process, so using gloves can save you a lot of hand heat
13 – Putty knife – this is for removing the print from the perf-board, and for cleanup
14 – X-Acto knife and blades – for cleanup
15 – Wire cutters – also for cleanup
16 – Tweezers – also for cleanup

Most of these are the very basic tools needed if you wish to do 3D printing.

However, if you plan to do a lot of 3D printing (like me) there are other things you will want to have. None of these are necessary for basic printing, but believe me, you will want to have these if you are serious about 3D printing and doing it right:

When I bought my Afinia H479 it was part of a bundle purchased through a third party, an approved vendor of Afinia. It came with the printer (and all you see above) bundled with three reels of Octave filament in my choice of colors, a set of 5 small chisels, and an extruder nozzle temperature switch. I found these to be absolutely necessary for any serious printing.

Set of Wood Chisels

The X-Acto knives that come with the Afinia are great for cutting. But most of cleanup is not cutting the plastic, it’s prying and wedging along natural separation lines. I would recommend not using the X-Acto knife at all. I’m more likely to expect the blade to snap than it to work well.

You can purchase a set at a hobby or wood-working shop. The Octave 3D Printer Tool Kit A (shown) is what I bought with my Afinia as part of the bundle. It is a set of five hardened steel wood chisels and they are essential for cleanup. This one comes with a flat blade, an angled blade, a 90 degree wedged blade, and two curved blades.

With these, cleanup is much easier.

Octave Extruder Nozzle Temperature Switch

Afinia’s Premium Filmanet works perfectly with the stock Afinia H479 printer. This filament extrudes at around 260° Celcius. No problems. Cleanup is easy, it prints beautifully.

However, most ABS filament prints at a lower temperature. You can use third-party filaments on the Afinia without changing the extrusion temperature, but the plastic fuses harder, making removal from the raft layers and cleanup far harder. Printing at the correct temperature for the filament makes cleanup so much easier!

The Octave Extruder Nozzle Temperature Switch is a simple device. It is a two-way switch with a resistor on the active circuit. It is attached to two plugs. The extruder nozzle is attached to the Afinia by identical versions of these plugs. You simply separate the plugs on the Afinia, and fit this directly in-line. All you’re doing is inserting this switch into the circuit.

It also comes with a plastic printed part to secure the switch to the top of the Afinia Extruder Heat Shield.

If left in the off position, the Afinia prints at its native temperature of 260°C. If you turn the switch on, restart and re-initialize the printer, it now prints at around 230°C.

Octave no longer sells this simple switch on their web-site. They have replaced it with two more sophisticated switches. One has 8 different temperature settings, and the other can do 127 settings, each one using similar 8-bank DIP switches.

Warning! – This add-on hardware is NOT approved by Afinia and sending a printer to them for repair under warranty with the switch attached may void your warranty!

Octave Adapter and Filament Reel Holder Spindles

Octave makes available free on its web-site a set of .STL files to print a modular filament reel holder system. Download these and get printing.

The reel holder that is supplied with the Afinia H479 is not useful for many third-party reels which have different size holes and different widths. Also, it is screwed to the body of the printer so fast swapping for a different holder is difficult.

Octave’s Adapater is a housing that screws to the Afinia and then any number of different reel holder spindles can be swapped in and out in seconds.

They supply various reels that fit the housing, but I found that several of them could be combined into one singular design, so I made some modifications and made available my own multi-reel holder.

It works by having several consecutive dips in a rod spaced for the various known reel widths, and is small enough around to fit most reels. The Afina reel with its large hole does not need a large curved holder. It works perfectly fine on my “universal” reel spindle.

This works with almost all reels I have printed with including Afinia Premium, Afinia Value Line (with a thinner spool hole) and Octave’s wider spools. It is downloadable free from Thingiverse and fits Octave’s universal adapter.

Borosilicate Glass

The perf-boards that come with the Afinia are fine for most normal printing but they have serious drawbacks for serious printing hobbyists. ABS is extruded into the holes during printing of the raft layers and it grips the print to the bed fairly well. It can also be covered in blue masking tape which holds very well for smaller prints. However, you will begin to notice that on objects with a larger base, corners and edges will peel up during printing no matter what you do, as long as you use these perf-boards. Warping will be a constant issue.

Now it is not.

I was skeptical at first, when the guys at Afinia talked to me about their new Borosilicate glass. But I was eager to try it so I bought three sheets.

First, it is thicker than the perf-boards, and requires larger clips to hold it down. You will have to recalibrate your nozzle print height since, as I said, thicker.

Printing on the glass alone does nothing useful. The real trick to this method is the acetone slurry you will have to mix.

Luckily, this is fairly easy and the glass comes with instructions. Simply put, you mix acetone with 10% (by weight) of scraps of ABS. You can use rafting cast-off, or clip small lengths of unused filament right off the reel. (Use the scrap.) Cut it up into small bits and put it in a sealed glass jar with the acetone and stir for a while. Let it sit for a few hours and soon you will have a thin soupy mixture of acetone and ABS called slurry.

Get a vinyl brush (not plastic – acetone melts certain plastics) and use it to brush a thin layer of the liquid slurry over the top of the Borosilicate glass and let it dry. It dries in seconds.

Then clip the Borosilicate glass to the print bed with the (supplied) larger clips and print.

Amazingly, the raft layer bonds to the slurry on the glass like crazy! I have no idea whay sorcery is involved but it works! And removal? Believe it or not when the glass cools, (two-three minutes) the print peels up better than the perf-board. As it cools you can hear cracking sounds. This is the ABS unsticking itself from the formerly hot surface. It lifts off as if it was never stuck in the first place.

This is magic you simply have to see for yourself to believe.

I have been using this method exclusively since I got it and I have had almost no warping or peeling-up of a print (except where my slurry was incorrectly mixed.)

Calipers

If you are into designing 3D models for printing like I am, not just downloading and printing things, one of the most essential tools you will need is a measuring caliper. This is a device with a ruler on a sliding arm with claw tips that can be used to measure distances of widths of objects. Perfect for measuring a pipe’s diameter, or the inside diameter of a hole you need to make a plug for, it allows you to accurately measure distances which you can than use in designing your 3D models.

You can also buy digital versions but for my purposes, I figured a standard one would suffice so I got one much like the one pictured. I like it, but the digital versions are calling me… I must get one, but they are much more expensive.

Summary

I have been printing with an Afinia H479 for 14 months. I have printed literally thousands of individual parts, hundreds of print runs, completely used up a dozen filament reels, currently have more than a dozen active reels, and I have a fair amount of expertise in printing with the Afinia H479 printer. I still say that along with my Commodore 64 in the 1980s, this is the best machine I have ever purchased. I have been waiting for this machine all of my life, and I now have it. You can count on me for advice on making your printing life better.

Some time ago my 3D printer (Afinia H479) had an issue with a broken internal part. The part was, itself, printed by an Afinia printer. The folks at Afinia “fixed my printer by e-mail”, sending me a file to print a replacement part, and then sending me a physical one by courier as well, in case my printer was incapable of printing the replacement.

I super-glued the broken part together which held well enough for me to print a replacement, which I put into the printer.

Perhaps not surprisingly, there are around a dozen or so parts in the Afinia that were printed on the Afinia, many of which are internal and hold the drive belts and other stuff.

But when my fan hood was causing me some issues with the new, larger clips used for the Borosilicate glass I bought, I mentioned it to the guys at Afinia and they sent me the file, and I made some adjustments, and printed the new fan hood – in blue! (Note: I already had the file in .UP3 format, which means I could print it, but I could not edit it. They kindly sent me the .STL version so I could make the necessary changes.)

It got me thinking. The Afinia software installer comes with all of the parts you may ever need to print, so I thought, now that I have so many colors, why not print one of each in as many colors as I can?

Here is the result.

You see here a stock Afinia H479 printer, but with some add-ons I have been using for a while.

• The protective heat shield I printed in Afinia Premium Yellow.\
• The fan hood I printed in Afinia Premium Blue
• The A_O on the hood is a piece which holds an Octave temperature switch which I now use to switch between ABS filaments intended for the Afinia, and other filaments which print at a slightly lower temperature. I printed this in Afinia Premium Red.
• At the upper left is the modular spool system Octave created, and I updated. The Spool Nipple Base is printed in Orange-Red.
• The Spool Nipple is printed in Zen Toolworks Silver.
• The Spool Housing (lower left) is printed in Octave Green. This holds quickly replaceable spool holders.
• The orange spool holder (holding a reel of Afinia Premium White) is printed in Octave Orange. I modeled this myself to hold several different reel designs without having to swap out holders. It uses increasingly deep gravity dips in order to fit at least 3 different reel sizes.
• The neon yellow spool holder on the table is designed specifically for a small 1Kg reel (I have only one, the red-orange)
• The print bed is loaded with a sheet of Afinia Borosilicate Glass which has made my printing life so much easier! It is clipped with four red clips.
• On the print bed is a trophy my friend and I designed and printed for an internal company competition.
• I did not replace the main head unit which holds the motor, feeder and nozzle machinery. It remains white.

I apologize that the lighting isn’t great. Detail gets lost. I will try for a better shot later. Particularly the two yellows look almost the same, and they are NOT the same, not the least bit.

Even before I got my Afinia H479 printer, I was modeling a Moon Buggy from Space: 1999. It was one of the first things I wanted to print.

Here it is, in a publicity shot from the TV show. (It’s clearly a publicity shot… they’re on the moon without helmets!)

So as a test, I sent a file to them to print. It was not my model. I found it on the internet, and it was not optimized for 3D printing. It had its problems, not the least of which being that it was not correctly proportioned, and was not overly accurate. Here it is:

I spent weeks modeling this, refining it, and it was indeed one of the very first things I printed on my Afinia. As a smaller sample, just to see what it would print like:

Then I printed it a little larger, with the rest of the parts, in neon yellow and black:

I let this project sit for a while as I was working on many GI Joe toys and other things.

But this last couple of weeks I have been modeling pods for my Dinky and Konami Eagles, and I finally got up the urge to print the whole Moon Buggy. One reason for my delay is that it would take about 13 hours to print the body, if I wanted the highest resolution. Since I had never printed it fully before, I decided to do a test print at .2mm, rather than at .15mm. It took 8.5 hours to print. The result was not bad. It had some issues with oxidization on the print nozzle which dropped carbon deposits into the print at inopportune places, but hey, it’s dirt. Moon Buggies get dirty.

Here is a close-up of the sloped front, which was always an area of concern for me, because a layered printing method will inherently add stepping, which could be unsightly.

But it wasn’t as bad as I had expected, and I’m sure it will be better when I embark on my later, highest-resolution print. But for now, I completed this version:

I printed the black parts (there are six wheels. Only four are pictured here.)

Then I printed some white parts (not pictured: Mirrors and headlights)

I masked off the yellow bumper every .5cm and then painted it black. I snapped it to the body.

Then I glued on the wheels, using a cardboard spacer to ensure they weren’t too tight against the body:

Here is the completed model, with black gas cap, white mirrors and headlights, wheels with coat hanger lengths for axles, the seats are in place, and the control rods (paper clips) glued in place with handles.

Update: June 5, 2014

Since I posted pics of this on the facebook Space 1999 fan pages, I was commissioned to create two 1:30 scale versions, without the engine hub, just a flat rear bed. So I printed a 1:30 version as a test, or close enough. Probably more like 1:36 or so… a bit smaller than 1:30. Here you see it next to this larger one, and a tiny one I had printed at Shapeways to scale with my Product Enterprise Eagle:

I haven’t yet painted the black banding on the medium one, or the small one, though I intend to. And then I have to do decals for them.

After making the Winch Pod for the 4″ Eagles made in Japan by Konami, I decided that next I would tackle adapting it for the Dinky Eagle.

The Dinky Eagle is approximately 9″ in length and has a strong metal spine for support, but that gets in the way of having an open pod.

The tiny size of the Konami meant I had to cut corners on the design of the superstructure at either end of the Winch Pod. I made it solid rather than of interlaced piping, for scale and convenience. It would never print on my printer that small.

But the Dinky Eagle had to have it.

I had to first make a holding system that would work with that spine while not getting in the way, and working with the double-claw mechanism that the Dinky Eagle uses to hold onto its pods.

The Prototype

(I print in neon yellow to ensure the model is working, and so I don’t waste colored filament, and so I can always know it was a test print.)

So here is the holding rack, with hole for the grasping claws, attached to the floor of the pod:

But you can’t see the hole from here.

Here is the fully assembled test print, from above, showing the claw hole:

Here is the same model from the side, showing all of the detail of the Winch Pod:

Here it stands next to the Dinky Passenger Pod:

The yellow doesn’t photograph terribly well due to its slight translucency in bright light.

Here it is, snapped to an Eagle:

When I looked at the finished pod, I realized that the holding rack did not have to be fully closed. I remodeled it to open it up, thusly:

Note: This made cleanup of the piece harder, so I may have to strengthen it a bit by making it just a tad less open. But the concept worked well.

Production Model

First, I printed the barrels, legs and engine cones in silver:

I started printing final production pieces at .15mm slices in Slow mode, for the best possible print my Afinia H479 can do, using Premium White for the body and Silver (which is really just a shiny grey) for the winches, legs and engine cones.

Here is the floor, the two pieces on either side of the floor, and the winch base, with the rectangles I printed to align them:

A word about those pieces. Why not just make holes in the platform? When you 3D print something, it prints the underside on a raft. It’s fairly easy to peel up a flat surface. But it gets harder the more detail you have underneath, and having an underneath with “floors” at different levels makes cleanup much harder. So I printed these “plugs” to just work better. You may notice some messy plastic in the holes in the larger pieces. That’s ok because these parts are hidden, and I only needed enough vertical room in these places for the plug to align them. It looks a bit more complicated than it had to be, but for 3D printing, this is actually just easier.

Here, I have placed the “plugs” into the holes on the three pieces, and now they will be a breeze to align to the floor:

Ouch. Lighting! Shooting these shots on my table means sometimes the detail gets lost. Anyway, here is the floor assembled:

Here is the Winch Pod basically assembled:At this angle you can’t see the legs and engine cones, but more or less this is finished. Note, however, that I messed up and the barrel on the right has the wrong cap on the front end. I figured it wouldn’t matter since the barrel is just a barrel, but I was wrong. The barrel is not just a barrel. It has a slice taken out of it to fit it into the winch housing.

Here is the bottom. Feet and engines in place:

The Toy Version

Since the original Dinky Passenger Pod has red legs and rocket engines (mine does anyway) I decided to make a more toy-like version as Dinky itself might have made it (without the metallic green and/or blue parts.)

Here is the assembled toy version:

And here is the bottom:

I think for my own interests, I’d prefer to have (for my white Eagle with red jets) a version with the silver/gray winch barrels, but with red engines and silver feet.

I also decided to experiment with a more ivory-toned white, which I think closer matches the original Eagle.

I put a finished pure-white/silver version up on eBay with a starting bid of $19.99 (shipped free US).

Here it is next to the Product Enterprise version which I used as a reference in modeling this.

Of course proportions and other features had to be changed to make it work well with the Dinky Eagle, but the result is strong and plays well. You can drop the Eagle down onto the pod and pick it up with ease, and then drop it off using the clamp trigger. Very fun.

My Favorite Version

Since the white Dinky Eagle (usually shipped as a Freighter with a red cargo bay to carry nuclear waste containers) had red underjets, I printed a new version of this pod with two changes:

– It’s printed in a less pure white. This is more of an ivory color and has no translucency. It seems to fit the Eagle a bit better.
– I printed the feet in gray/silver, but the underjets in red, to match the Eagle itself.

I think it looks very nice:

One Last Change

I have to say I am very satisfied with this project. I was able to make two pods with quick revisions. The Winch Pod was modeled for the 4″ Konami, scaled up, superstructure ends added, structural functionality put in for attachment/detachment, and with minor changes (removing the central winch) I was able to make a true Freighter Pod, sometimes called a Pallet Pod, used to carry the Nuclear Waste Containers around.

But I wondered if I could make this just a tad more accurate by adding longitudinal ridges to the floor. I wasn’t sure this would print well, since that floor has to be on the raft. I print these upside down, and cleanup with this color is harder.

However, it printed rather nicely, and I was also concerned the ridges would be too small to resolve on my printer. I needn’t have worried. The result is rather nice:

Freighter Pod (Pallet Pod)

Also featured on the TV show was a pod that was essentially a flat-bed. It held containers of nuclear waste which was off-loaded into storage on the moon.

I made a minor adaptation to my Winch Pod, removing the central winch pieces, and then I modeled some Nuclear Waste Containers. Here they are for my Dinky and my Konami Eagles:

I have to say, putting those decals on the Konami-scaled barrels was difficult. Each decal is less than an inch long, wrapped fully around a barrel about the size of half a Tylenol.

NOTE: For anyone who buys these models from me at my shop (Fourth D) on Shapeways, you may want to print the decal sheet I created. The two links below are to PDF files you can print.

Pod-Decals-Better-Layout

Pod-Decals-Instructions

You can print them on white waterslide paper either in laser or inkjet (make sure you have the right paper and follow instructions that come with the paper) or you can print them on simple white paper and use simple glue if you like. The decal sheet has both the Konami and Dinky scaled decals. Also, the instructions for the decals (for waterslide) are available here.

Some time ago now I modeled a forced-perspective display base for the 4″ Konami Eagles, for printing on my Afinia H479 3D printer.

Here is a sample, printed on my printer:

It’s hard to see the detail because the sub-surface light scattering on this particular plastic hides the ambient light and detail.

I made my model available on Thingiverse, a repository of free downloadable models.

Marco Scheloske, a member of Space: 1999 Merchandise facebook group, sent my model to Shapeways for printing. He had it printed in the various colors, but then added paint detail (including the landing lights that I completely left off my original model – but intend to add in) and here was his result:

Now I have to do this myself! I must send this away to Shapeways, and though it was a bit expensive – he says about 40 Euros for him – I must have one, to see what the quality is like.

For that matter, maybe it’s time I opened up a Shapeways shop…