At this point the printer isl making more parts for itself. Teal (my wife) compared it to Frankenstein adding his own parts after he had an arm attached.
One of the first part sets was to make a case and mount for the display. The case turned out quite well, but the design of the bracket to mount it to the frame was unusable. So I will be searching for another or designing one myself.
The advantages of being able to walk away and let the printer just run and return to a safe state are huge. With the print head on the CNC router, I had to keep checking on the progress and shut it down at the end as the software could not control the print head heater . Now not only is it running and shutting down properly I get messages on my phone confirming the status. With Repetier host https://www.repetier.com/, you can add an app to your phone, Repetier Informer, and get notifications of start, stop, faults and progress (among others). So today as I was again multitasking,getting the spring gardening done and wandering about the yard, I was getting notifications so I could check up on the printing status while finishing the placement of 20 yards of wood chips and propagating many perennials. This was to gain more flower beds with perennial plantings and reduce lawn area and Buckthorn thickets. I was doing my Earth Day yard work.
Today the printer was making cable chain. I am not sure if this a good trade-off of time vs cost. Cable chain is used to make a nice flexible assembly to hold your wires / cables for moving devices. For the CNC router I bought the cable chain from an eBay supplier in China. For the 3D printer, the printer itself is making the cable chain links but I have to do the part clean-up and fitting. The printing is not yet tuned in well enough to avoid a lot of hand work on these parts.
Spool holder to hold the filament spool while printing.: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1959643/#files. This replaces the ugly aluminum rod seen earlier in the photos and removes obstructions. This is a very nice and simple, functionally designed part. “Frankenstein printer” did well on making this appendage.
Cable chain. This supports the wires going to print head in a neater manner than the spiral wrap. I am using the part designs from: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:611593/#files . I wanted cable chain that would be open on top so I do not have to re-run the wires in the frame with the need to then disconnect re-connect everything for the print head. We will see how this turns out. The notches look like they will need some fiting for the snake shaped cable retainers (cable ties bay do instead). Cable chain parts are slow to print . A set of 16 links takes about 5 hours. Then there is some tedious hand work to clean up the parts and make them fit together well. I think 2 sets of 16 links, plus the end parts should suffice for the print head cable chain. Here is the first set of links fitted together, roughly straight and as a U.
