TB-406 Insoluables Tailings Tank

This is a project that's actually tied into my day-job.

One of my projects at work is to replace a steel tank at a mining facility. I worked with one of our staff designers on the tank drawings, and the project manager, who had seen my printer during the "Bring Your Kids To Work Day" commissioned me to print it.

The designer was able to export the model from AutoDesk as a .stl. I printed a prototype as a solid model, but did not really like how it turned out. Several of the connections were too small, and the top layers didn't print well on top of the 10% infill I specified.

I printed the final version in two parts. I used TinkerCAD to separate the roof plate from the rest of the vessel, and printed the main body with 0% infill and 0 top layers. I spent a couple hours editing the model of the top plate to make everything thick enough to print, mostly by changing I beams into solid rectangles.

Overall, I think it turned out pretty well:

My Project Manager was very pleased!

Incidentally, this is a 25.4:1 scale model of the real tank. That's because the original model was in inches, and my printing software defaults to millimeters!

For size context:

Prints for Coworkers

I printed off a few things for some coworkers:

Source: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:73489

Source: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:223393

All printed in PETG. There was ZERO warping on that big flat bottom of that last one. I'm very poud of that.

Nintendo Switch Stand - First Print in PETG!

Now that Kid's Day was successfully complete, I was ready to experiment. I broke out my first roll of PETG - bright orange. I printed out a little Charmander to make sure things looked ok:

Source: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:323038

Then I knocked out the Nintendo Switch Stand:

Source: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2164088

The customer (a dude at my office) was pleased!

"The Last Word" from Destiny

In early April, I was asked to make a model of a pistol called "The Last Word" from the video game Destiny as a birthday present. I found a model I liked on the site MyMiniFactory.com and started trying to print it. This commission has been the connecting thread running through nearly all my experiences with the Rostock since I first got it printing.

Someone else's (successful) print

First attempt was just the handle on coarse settings, to get an idea of how big it would be in real life. I printed the two halves side-by-side, then glued them together. They warped pretty badly:

The warping prompted me to get started on the heated build chamber.

Once I had the chamber assembled, but before I added the heat lamp, I tried again. This time I combined the files for the handle and the body into one print, with the infill set at 50%:

50% infill was too high. I aborted the print and tried again, going back to 30% infill:

I still had pretty bad warping on the handle, and I don't really know what caused the last dozen layers to start drifting like that. It happened while the print ran overnight, and the error has not repeated since.

Once I got the heat lamp installed and the heated chamber completed, I tried printing the handle and body that would mate with my previous attempt. This time the X-tower belt broke about half-way through the print.

At this point, the birthday for which this piece had been commissioned had arrived. I assembled the two largest failed prints, along with some of the smaller pieces that had successfully printed, as a sort of "IOU" that I could present at the birthday party.

This turned out to be for the best: The gun is pretty huge, even without the barrel (which I had not even attempted to print yet). The recipient requested I scale down the whole thing to 80%.

Once I got the belt fixed and added a second heat lamp to the Rostock, I made a fresh attempt at the 80% scale model. At this point, the cold end of the extruder over-heated and jammed about a quarter of the way through. Literally minutes after I last checked the printer before going to bed.

As you can see, the 80% scale is a pretty significant reduction in size.

Once I moved the extruder cold end outside the heated chamber, I tried again. After a few false starts due to poor bed leveling or bad bed prep, I had a success!

I still had a little warping on one corner (the heated chamber was only at 40C), so I stuck a helper disc on that corner for the mating print. There was also a lot of stringing (kinda hard to see in this photo). Stringing is usually due to poor retraction, and since I increased the length of the bowden tube by more than 50% when I moved the extruder outside the heated chamber but did not adjust the retraction settings, I should have expected this. I made a small adjustment on the next part and see how that turns out.

The helper discs worked perfectly! No warping at all on the next print:

I had adjusted the retraction from 6.7mm to 10mm, which reduced the stringing but did not eliminate it.

I also knocked out the chamber, which I printed without support. It's pretty.

Interestingly, one of the skirts got dragged under the first layer and I was unable to fish it out before the first layer was printed:

Progress Pic:

The barrel turned out pretty nicely for the first try. I set it up so the two files comprising the barrel printed at the same time. Unfortunately, that still left a visible seam - I'll have to develop my CAD skills to fix that kind of thing in the future.

A quick zip-tie assembly of all the finished parts:

Gluing the pieces together. I had to go out and buy more clamps:

I modeled up my own "pin" to hold the chamber onto the hinge, and was so excited to see the finish line that I forgot to take a picture. The hinge itself pivots on a piece of nail, so there shouldn't be any worry of the hinge wearing out. Here it is with the glue drying:

Aaaaaaaand here's the final product!

Just shy of two month's worth of hobby time. Phew.

Original file here.

Nozzle: 230C
Bed: 100C
Chamber: 50C
Layer height: 0.2mm
Speed: 40mm/s
Time: around 40 hours for the final version.
Material: Hatchbox ABS