I’m a big fan of Blake’s 7, as is a friend of mine. He asked if I could print a Liberator, the space ship the rebel band discover and inhabit, and I said “Already downloaded, man!” Thingiverse has a Liberator that looks to print rather nicely. It is not terribly detailed, but if this print is successful, I may add detail later and reprint. Originally it was modeled to print at about 19″. I’m going to print it at half-scale and see what I get. Later, I may do the full 19″ model.

This post will be updated as I go, rather than start a new post. This is tonight’s effort: (July 2, 2013). I took the Fuselage Front Spike and am printing it twice at .5 scale, at .2mm, Normal.

I tried this part first because it has a thin spike. This may not print well, and if not, I will have to load the model into Maya and scale the spikes outward so they thicken. But until I print this test, I won’t know that. Here is the printing record:

Fuselage Front Spike

281 layers – These numbers will represent a PAIR of parts, for making TWO Liberators.
3.2 grams of ABS
22 minutes

Ok, color me impressed. Here is the pair of Front Nacelle parts hot off the printer. It printed the spikes! (Close-up they are a bit rough, but it printed them!)

You can see the struts are a bit rough. Not unexpected. I’m a bit surprised they came out this good. I may later model holes in the pieces and use some other material for the thin struts, since there are four of them on the model, and they will be quite delicate. I think I may try to find some metal wire to replace them. It will require re-printing these pieces, but that’s not painful.

Fuselage Front

291 layers
20.1 grams of ABS
1 hour, 41 minutes

And here it is (two copies) next to the Front Nacelle:

Fuselage Main

210 layers
15.9 grams of ABS
1 hour, 25 minutes

You may notice fine spiderweb-like hairs stretching between the two pieces. This would be bad if it was on the actual piece itself, but it isn’t. The vertical lines you see in front and on the sides are support scaffolding for the holes that are in the side of the fuselage. Since those holes are horizontal, there needed to be some support material to support the roof of those holes. Think of the roof of a cave. So those support scaffolds print very quickly since they are so tiny, and the print nozzle goes between them very quickly, forming these hairs. It does not do it between regularly printed parts, usually (an exception for cheaper filaments melting at too hot a temperature.)

But those vertical scaffolds just tear away to form clean clyinders.

How stupid! I realize as I test-fit these together, that these Main Fuselage pieces must have been printed at .4 scale, not .5. I must have fat-fingered the scale value. They are too small! Have to re-print!

So I reprinted them in what must be the most boring print ever – Two vertical, unfeatured cylinders, 2 hours, 41 minutes. Zzzzz. :-)

Next up (tonight):

Fuselage Rear

278 layers
27.5 grams of ABS
2 hours, 12 minutes

I decided since I needed so many of the pins used to connect the pieces, I’d print six of them with these two rear fuselage parts. However, one pin fell over and it caused some downstream printer errors. Here is the result: (I have already removed the pins from the board.)

See the hairs coming out of the one on the left? That’s where the print head tried to print a sixth pin, finding nothing, it left filament on the air, trailing it to this piece. A little X-Acto knife work and you would never notice.

Here are the parts as they are now:

Nacelle Front and Nacelle Spikes

Printed two each of these last night. As expected, the spikes came out about the same as the front spike. But it does highlight the need to remake these thicker for a smaller print, probably with holes so I can fit in toothpicks or something else.

Nacelle Middle

206 layers
27.0 grams
1 hour, 41 minutes

These printed without issue.

Nacelle Strut

166 layers
2.8 grams
21 minutes

I printed six, so triple the time and grams above. I wanted them done so I printed them all. It highlighted some issues: Where the pegs have holes, the scaling down thinned the walls so much that the holes showed through the printed walls, leaving gaps. Not sure how that plays out when assembling them. We’ll see later.

Here’s what I have done now:

But I had a problem. I was getting ready to print something else in a new color when the nozzle head jammed. I withdrew the premium natural color you see here, and extruded in a yellow. I’ve done this dozens of times without issue. However this time the extrusion didn’t work. It pulled the filament into the head, but then the feeder motor began a clicking noise, like it couldn’t advance the filament. I withdrew it again and checked the manual.

It’s vague on what to do in this situation. It does give instructions on how to remove the nozzle if it’s clogged, but I removed it and tried to extrude again, but it still got stuck. So the problem is in the feeder, not the nozzle, even though the nozzle could use a cleaning.

I sent an e-mail off to Afinia, but this being July 4th, no one will answer it today. There goes my evening of printing stuff.

Oh well… so for now:

THE PRINT SHOP IS CLOSED.

Afinia got back to me on Monday, today, after a four-day weekend, with a PDF file showing exactly how to unclog the feeder mechanism. Not wanting to void the warranty, I certainly did not poke around with this machine on the weekend. But when I got home this evening, I took the head off, took it apart and fixed it.

For the second time, Afinia has fixed my printer by e-mail.

So tonight I continued printing Lierator parts. I wondered what color to print the “green globes” in, since I had no green. I was thinking blue, but the ugly neon yellow I had seemed to have an internal glow about it, so I went with that for now. When I get green, I’ll reprint these and replace them.

So tonight I printed four of these, two for each copy of the Liberator I’m making:

Globes:

127 layers
14.5 grams
1 hour, 38 minutes

This is the end result. I printed these twice, so I have all I need.

 July 10 Update

I printed four Nacelle Spikes and two Nacelle Middles last night. This morning I printed two Nacelle Rears. This completes one model, leaving only two more Middles and Rears to print for the second model, which I will print tonight.

All that will then be left is the pegs to connect all the bits together, and the display stands. I’ll start on that as soon as possible.

Until then, here’s a photo of all the parts (minus the pegs and stand):

So with all the parts printed, including all the pins I need (and the small ones are small!) I printed the display stand:

Display Stand:

239 layers
13.0 grams
1 hour, 11 minutes

So with this done I used clear binary epoxy resin to glue it all together, which was a bit more of a challenge than anticipated due to the pin size. I had to use a metal tool to widen some of the holes a bit, and clip some of the pins. And when gluing one engine onto the body the pair of pins just broke, so I just had to hold it, hoping the alignment wasn’t too bad, until the epoxy hardened. It’s ok, but it’s off by a degree.

Here’s the first final completed Liberator.

And now for a tally for two models:

Total ABS Used – 263.8 grams
Total Time – ~25 hours, including the pins

The Afinia White filament costs $45.00 for 700 grams (plus shipping, but let’s leave shipping out of this for the exercise.)

$16.96 to print a pair of these. Not at all bad.

I put the parts together for my TB3 rocket homage to Thunderbird 3 a few nights ago.

Since angles were not perfect, since my tab-and-slot modeling wasn’t designed (yet) to fit snugly and form perfect angles, some pieces weren’t a perfect fit after gluing, so I had to Dremel down some connections, I’m very happy with the result:

Here, again, is the concept, so you can see how closely I got to it. (Remember, the numbers will not be printed.)

From these parts:

When I was a teenager, a friend of mine had a model kit of Moonbase Alpha from Space 1999. It was amazing. It was a model kit built on a landscape about 20″ across, about 14″ tall, and on it you glued down the various concentric buildings of Moonbase Alpha, and 3 Eagle Landing pads. Well in the last decade or so, ERTL re-issued that model kit, and I have one.

The landscape parts suck, so last year I spent some time making a 20″x20″ styrofoam moonbase landscape so I could make this kit up right and frame it in a shadow box for my wall. I had this ready to put together when one of my cats destroyed my lunarscape with her claws… grrr. I have to start over.

But the interesting thing is, upon looking at actual plans for Moonbase Alpha (readily available online) show that there are in fact five landing pads, while the model kit supplies only three.

Other than the landing pads being a bit too large, and the Eagles (six tiny Eagles came with the kit) were way too big, this was a lovely model kit, and could make for a very nice display.

But the problem was, in order to make this model properly, you really needed two more landing pads.

I spent some time last year with a binary molding putty and a binary resin, casting landing pads from the mold I made, but they were flawed. It was around that time I first realized you could get 3D printers for less than ridiculous prices, and my first thought ever about what to print on a 3D printer was these extra landing pads.

So today I modeled a landing pad, and made some improvements on the original. One problem with the originals is that there was no docking neck and the “house” was inaccurate.

So I fixed that and printed this:

The one on the left is the ERTL model. The one on the right I modeled myself and printed at .15mm in Normal mode with Premium White ABS plastic. (The white makes detail harder to read in photos, but it’s really not bad.)

Since this model kit is hard to find these days, and people want to build them up accurately, I may actually be able to sell some of these on eBay. Not sure if they will pay for themselves time-wise, (the amount of time I have to spend printing) but selling a few of these may allow me to buy a bit more filament.

The 1970s Gerry Anderson TV series Space 1999 was iconic. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and it enjoys huge fan admiration throughout the world to this day. I wanted to be able to make a fairly accurate model of the Moon Buggy used in the series which was a barely modified Amphicat, a six-wheeled ATV readily available in the early 1970s.

These were fairly popular in the 1970s. In fact another well-known (at the time) TV show featured them: The Banana Splits.

GI Joe even had a couple, but heavily modified by Hasbro. There was the GI Joe Adventure Team ATV used in several of the cooler toy sets:

Irwin also made one to scale with the GI Joe line, which was much more accurate to the real Amphicat, though not totally accurate:

In fact, I even found one in my grandmother’s home town in Newfoundland, parked near the house she grew up in:

So I decided to model one, using photographic images as my best reference. Here’s where I am now:

The model as it currently appears here has nine parts. Each wheel is its own piece, eventually to have a metal axle, so each wheel pair can rotate, the bottom section, the upper section and the black bumper trim.

I modeled it solid, but I had to split it for better printing, and to fit the trim in if I wanted the trim to be printed in a different color.

So today I test-printed it at about three inches in length to see how the pieces would fit.

To cut it up I dissected the model at the trim line where the model forms an edge. However, the interior of the vehicle’s flat surfaces are actually lower than this cut, so I had to make some adjustments and make the slice across the body pyramidal, rather than perfectly flat.

This left a very thin floor to the top section of the vehicle, but I wanted that to be a solid piece, with floor, to smooth the transition to the inside wall of the vehicle.

But when I lifted the top section off the rafting (the layer of plastic the printer lays down first to ensure a good print) it couldn’t distinguish between raft and floor and the floor was far too thin.

This happened: (Well, after I did some trimming)

I cut the seat and engine housing off because what was left of the floor it was on was not there… but by coincidence or design the top still fits nicely on the bottom piece, as if the floor on the bottom piece (supposedly a gluing surface) actually works ok as the actual interior floor of the Amphicat. I may have to redesign the thing to have a thicker floor, but even that may not work. I may take advange of the good fit and just print the top half without floor, and put the floor as the topmost layer of the bottom half.

The trim sandwiches nicely (hopefully) in between the two parts, which have a gap when put together just the right shape for the trim to fit in.

I am currently printing the trim and wheels.

Here are all the parts that I have modeled up until now. There are some small parts coming, in fact the seat cushions are currently on the printer, being printed.

Here is the trim, snapped onto the body, being glued in place:

And here, the wheels are being glued on. As I said, I will be making axles, but for now, I’m just gluing them on to see what they will look like.

And, at least for now, this is the final print. The yellow is hideous, and the black very shiny, but not bad for a 3″ version.

Update: I took a few more snaps in somewhat better lighting conditions:

So after the weirdnesses with printing some of these parts (and learning some good lessons) I now have this:

These are all the parts ready to glue together. (Note, for V1.0, this rocket has some tiny tabs and slots in places, but they are for guidance only at this point. Later, I will make them so they slot together much better, and that will align them, hopefully. For now, I’m using Superglue and masking tape to hold the alignment until the glue hardens.

I anticipate some ill-fitting because gluing of parts can be a bit arbitrary, and a tiny bit of a degree off can cause some misalignment. The aforementioned better slotting should take care of that in V2.0, which I probably won’t work on until later in the summer.

Last night I printed six things on the printer in a single print. This isn’t a bad idea. But as an experiment I printed them on the blue masking tape. These would be tall objects, or at least two of them are very tall, but four were moderate, and they had all printed before without issue.

Last night, however, when two items had finished (the shortest) and the two medium items were five layers from completion, the print head knocked one over into the other, ruining the print.

Tonight I printed the four spoiled items again. And though I used the bare perf board, the engine pieces knocked over again!

I’m not sure why. These are items that, as I have said, printed fine before. Perhaps it’s the fact that I’m printing multiple items. I’m now going to attempt to print them individually, because these are the last four parts I need for my rocket v1.0 to be fully ready to assemble.

Here’s an image of what I got when I got back to the room, and shut the print down:

At the stage of development we are now, home 3D printers are what I like to equate to a Commodore 64. The tech is awesome, and we can extrapolate that in a decade it will be so much more awesome. But for now, my tinkering feels just like it did when I was exploring the possibilities of my C64 back in the mid 1980s. It was an exciting time, and what I learned on that computer I took with me and made a career and a life out of.

I began calling my Afinia my new Commodore 64 because it brings back all that excitement and possibility. I haven’t felt this giddy about new technology since those days of the C64 purchase.

So I’m modeling a Commodore logo to stick to the Afinia printer (under the bed where it will be out of the way.) It will be tacked in place, nothing permanent…

This is the logo:

Here it is, extruded and beveled, and printed in three colors: Black for a base to sit it on (and align it), blue for two pieces, and red for one.

Here, glued in place:

As you can see in the 3D model, the engines have multiple colors. (Though the number 3 will not be modeled.)

I am printing those in color, not painting them, so I had to cut up the model yet make sure they fit together. Last night I cut them it up so it would fit into the main fin, as well as fit together.

It is not obvious from this rendering, but at the top of the engine is a black intake, a funnel into which the antenna struts go. I have not yet modeled the cylindrical hole to make those fit. I concentrated on making the pieces fit together.

The tricky one was the white top, as it had to act as a cap on a peg that would be both the black stripe and the rocket intake funnel.

Normally I print in the color the part will end up in, but for a quick test fit I just used the red color, so I wouldn’t have to change out the color 3 times, which is a bit time consuming.

These pieces do not yet have pegs to slot them together where they join, so I just SuperGlued them for now. (The final model will also require glue. I’m not making the connections that perfect.)

And here you have the result:

These are printed at .25mm. The final will be .15mm, so the connections between the pieces may be better. But when you print on an angle, you get stepping, and when you have two pieces that have stepping that are supposed to fit together, you hope for the best. With .15mm, the fit should be better than you see here.

Next: Drill a hole down through the engine parts that will fit the engine struts, and redesign the bottom piece to have a rocket cone. Right now it is round, and not a realistic engine. In the concept, that round bottom irised open to reveal a rocket exhaust. My finished model will just have a flat bottom with a cone in black (another snap-fit part I have yet to model.)

Update:

Last night I printed the pieces in color for a new test-fit. Then I began the process of drilling holes into the pieces to fit the antenna struts. This photo shows the engine assembled in color, (without the hole for the strut) and next to it, the top piece (which has the jet intake and the black stripe) with a hole drilled and the antenna strut test-fitted in it.

Next up: Drill a hole in the main body and redesign the slot for the main fin. I didn’t like the way the main fin fit up against the engine housing. Resolution at this level isn’t sufficient to make those pieces fit perfectly, so I’m going to make a slot in the engine for the entire fin connection to fit inside, just a bit, and then I have to redesign the bottom section of the body to do the same. Since that would require reprinting of both the bottom and mid body pieces, I may not do that yet.

But the white bottom piece has to change a bit too, to cut a maneuvering thruster hole there. I am also adding the real rocket engines to the dent in the bottom piece. (Originally the three engines were going to be sufficient, but with small thruster outlets, it made little sense that that could power this rocket. So instead I’m using the bottom divot to install three massive rocket engines. More on that as it develops.

Update 2:

Last night I added tabs and slots to each engine piece so they could slot together nicely for gluing with perfect alignment. The main engine body and the black stripe piece now have holes in them for the engine struts, and they fit perfectly. I redesigned the main fin slot to have a tent roof, rather than flat, because a flat roof requires support material, and a tented one does not. No visible difference, as it’s inside the part.

Here are the pieces, now complete, for this test model:

My next task is to print two more of this, and two more main fins and upper fins, and I can actually fully assemble my rocket as it is now, before I begin adding detail like thrusters and the like.

This whole 3D printing thing started with me wanting to print a Space:1999 Moonbuggy. I had just customized a 3.5″ Moon Buggy variant using a toy 8-wheel ATV I found on eBay. I painted it, printed custom decals, and the result is quite nice.

But it’s just a derivative variant. I wanted a more accurate one.

So I sent a test model I found online, not a very accurately modeled one, and the model wasn’t water-tight, and just not optimized for 3D printing, but the result wasn’t bad.

So now I’m printing a 1.75cm version of a model that I am working on from scratch, (in blue, because my Premium Yellow was back-ordered) to see how it scales with my Product Enterprise Eagle. The model is not finished yet, nor is it optimized to print so small.

So far it’s printing the body ok, but the wheels not so much. One seems to have come up off the raft. Oh well, printing at this tiny scale is probably not that recommended. Let’s see what the final result is. Perhaps to print 6 wheels I must print 12 and hope 6 of them come out ok.

Plus, some tiny detail will have to be removed if I intend to print this thing small. The tiny vents at the back, which are supposed to print ok at 4″, cause the back wall to print incorrectly. That’s an easy fix for when I do this again.

I mean COME ON!!!!

Update: Here are two more, printed in yellow and black for better color. (The yellow is a bit hideous. I’ve ordered a yellow that is far more like the original Moon Buggy, but I don’t have it yet.) I remodeled the back just a bit to fix the problem with the rear vents, but apparently it didn’t fully fix the issue. And I included a quick seat and engine cover in the back. The photo probably doesn’t show the detail well because of the sickly-translucent-Hi-Vis yellow…)

As you may recall from this post, the antenna struts of my TB3 Rocket gummed up if printed alone, due to the head not giving the plastic time to cool. This post is about how to do it right… and even righter.

And after fitting my curved upper arm onto the body, I thought it a bit thin, a bit flimsy. So I remodeled it by thickening it up a bit. I took the opportunity to print three antenna struts, so the print head would take time to go between them to print them, rather than gumming up the strut as you see in the picture above.

This was the result:

I did learn something though: Rather than print three, I should print five. When it was printing just the three struts, it kept going back and forth in a sensible way, so it would do A, then B, then C, then C, then B, then A. Only B got a clean cooling break. A and C got two layers in a row, which didn’t seem to harm them at all, but to play it safe next time, I’ll print five, and toss A and E, keeping B, C and D.

Meanwhile, I modeled three slots into the Lower Body piece to accommodate the Main Fins, modeled the Main Fins to fit into those slots, and created the slot that the main engines would eventually fit into, so I could test-print a Main Fin.

The printer is currently printing those pieces.

Meanwhile, here is the result of the reprinted black and yellow vanes, slotted into the body of the rocket:

The yellow (the cheaper plastic) needs to have some trimming done where the tips meet the black, but that’s easy.

And here it is, assembled, as of today. The only thing missing is the antenna strut which I had no good way to put on for this photo.

Once the arm, main fin, engine and antenna work, I will print two more and put them on the body, and I’ll basically be done this test print. Then to print one for real, at .15mm. Yikes. That will take some time to print!