Why have a 3D printer in a school? Are you nuts?

So, why would you want to have a 3D printer in a classroom anyway?  I mean, they are difficult to use, expensive to buy and operate and there is really no practical use for one other than printing IPhone cases and flash drive holders, right?

Well, having been a Biology teacher in the past I can tell you first hand that the possibilities that a printer presents in the Science classroom are limited only by your imagination.  From simulated frog dissections (above) to representing the periodic table in 3 dimensions according to densities of elements (below).

A printer also allows you to make some of the everyday things that you use in a lab or classroom such as test tube racks...

...a roller clamp for flexible tubing...

...a cover slip holder...

...or even a Sabertooth skull...

Now that we can see a couple of practical uses for a printer, what about cost, repairs and maintenance and all of the other stuff that eventually comes up?  Well, as for initial purchase costs, prices are coming down dramatically with each passing month. 3D printers are now at an affordable price for the casual homeowner to  have in their offices and shops.  Machines are getting better and cheaper at an astounding rate.  Do you remember when a cell phone was the size of a carry on bag and cost a small fortune?  Now look where we are.  Machines and the materials that we feed them are getting better and more reasonably priced.  Competition in the market is driving all of this and we can only expect more in the very near future.

I know there are those that are intimidated by the whole concept of 3D printing but do not fear!  There are some very user friendly machines out there (Afinia comes to mind) and the support through manufacturers, blogs and forums are amazing.  Not to mention other educators who already have experience with these things. 

Remember, this is happening very quickly so if you don't start to get your feet wet soon you'll really let your students down.  They should be, at the very least, exposed to this technology at the high school level, even the middle schools.  I know for a fact that there are several Universities and Community Colleges that are planning to offer Certifications in the field of 3D design and printing.

And as always, if there are questions please do not hesitate to drop me an email.  I will do my best to answer whatever questions you may have.  Happy printing!

Goals for 2015/2016 and beyond

As you can see from the above images, these are two prints that, due to their nature, required a lot of support material.  Not only is this support material difficult to remove but it is also a bit of a waste of material.  We are going to focus some of our efforts next year on printing with two heads on the Hyrel System 30, using one of the heads to print only the support material out of a dissolvable material.

We also want to push into printing with a wider variety of materials such as Moldlay, Sugru, Laywood and Laybrick, Ninja-flex and whatever else we can get our hands on.  For the first time in an Oregon High School, our students 3D printed a part for a metal working machine, then the students in our Metals 3 class sand-casted the printed part and poured a new one out of brass.  This is one of the collaborative efforts we have undertaken to try and get students cross curricular experience.  We intend to continue this sort of work and hope to expand students knowledge and abilities.

Prints not adhering to your build plate?

One of the most frustrating issues we come across with our 3D printers is the lack of adhesion of some prints to the build surface.  It doesn't seem to matter whether we use glass, perf board (such as on the Afinia), blue painters tape or Kapton tape or hair spray, there always seems to be a print or two that just doesn't want to stick.

After many (and I do mean a lot) prints here's what we seem to have learned from our experiences:

1.  The build plate must be level (pre-heat the plate)!!!  This is one of the easiest ways to ruin a print.  Especially larger prints that take up a larger portion of the build surface.  Here's a tip; keep an eye on the skirt (on some slicing software you have the option of altering how many loops and layers of skirting there are as well as the distance from your actual print the skirt is placed).  If you're not sure what a "skirt" is, this is a line of filament that is laid down outside of the perimeter of your actual object you are printing.  My assumption is that the skirt purges the extruder a little and allows you to see if the filament is being laid down in a consistent manner. 
Keep a close eye on the skirt as well as the first layer of your print to see if the filament width being laid down is consistent.  If it's wider in some places and thinner in others this can be a good indication that your build plate isn't level or flat.

2.  The build plate cannot have any of your nasty finger prints on it!!!  This is especially true for the Afinia perf board.  We have found that wiping the board with acetone just prior to a print can help a lot. 

3.  We pretty much use hair spray exclusively for adhesion on the Hyrel and the makerbots (Hyrel is a glass plate, makerbots are plastic and aluminum).  Interestingly enough, it seems to matter what brand as well (see the pic below).

Our setup with the hair spray happens this way; we clean the surface thoroughly with acetone, let it dry then spray a healthy dose of hair spray all over the plate.  Let it dry then re-apply one or two more times.  It hasn't seemed to hold as well with just a single layer of spray but after a few sprays and dries we have had good luck.  Doesn't have to be re-applied after every print either as it seems to last for quite a few jobs before it needs to be cleaned and prepped again.

4.  Pre-heat the build surface prior to tramming (leveling) and / or printing!!!  Heat does strange things to build plates.  Expansion and contraction, warping can have an effect on how level your plate is.  Obviously, PLA printing does not require this but since we print mostly with ABS it's a good idea to pre-heat the build surface whenever you are preparing to print or when you are tramming the bed.

These are just a few suggestions for keeping your prints stuck.  Let us know if you have any other suggestions we can try!

Hyrel up and running again

So after a long summer break, we started working toward getting our Hyrel System 30 up and running again.  This was not without some very frustrating issues as we had yet to get a good print from the machine.  Luckily, the folks at Hyrel are very attentive to our needs and we had a couple of Skype sessions with them to try and correct the problems we were having.  We have in our posession one of the earlier machines so there were some updates that were needed.  The guys walked us through all of the updates over the weekend and we set about trying to print with the new updates and recipes.

Here's what we got the first time we tried a complete print;

This is a macro LED ring for photography.  the one on the right was an epic failure due to a couple of things.  Sometimes our students get a bit impatient and they like to bump some of the print speeds up a bit too high.  What they found was that the infill print speed was too high and the machine was vibrating so bad that it shifted the print (along with a lot of other things).  We took a look at all of our settings and re-printed the one on the left.

We still have a lot to learn about this machine.  I know it will be able to create some fantastic parts, it's just a matter of asking Hyrel a lot of questions and working through the system.  The bottom line is that this is a very touchy and particular machine right now.  There is so much more the students will learn from this printer than they ever could from some of our other machines.  We have a lot more control over our print parameters and a ton more options in regards to materials we can use and with 4 heads they will learn a lot about multi head prints and how to produce them.

Below are a few more images from the macro ring to show you how the print came out.  Settings were as follows;
Layer height: 0.2 (1.75mm ABS)
Infill at 10% (and set to print very slowly...25 mm/s)
If you are interested in Hyrel print recipes this one was N0.50_Z0.10Hny35
All print speeds were at 25 mm/s (non-print speed was 130 mm/s)
Bed temp. was 70C and head was 240C
Hairspray kept it all stuck to the bed

We received a Next Engine 3D scanner a little while ago to try out.  This is a scanner that I would call a mid-level machine as it's not a Makerbot Digitizer (low end) nor is it a high end device.  My first impressions are that it is a well built machine that is relatively user friendly.  Our first scan was of a caveman (our mascot here at the high school) and it turned out fairly good.  Any mistakes that were made with this first scan should be attributed to us and not the scanner.  You really have to coat your object to be scanned with powder (we used foot fungus spray powder) in order to diminish and reflectivity.  The scanner doesn't like shiny surfaces at all.

In the photo above we are scanning a part for a student that goes on a small river racing boat.  The part is not only expensive to purchase but my understanding is that it can be quite hard to find.  Hopefully we can reproduce it with enough accuracy for it to be useful.

We are going to use the heck out of this machine while we have it.  I hope to get our science department involved in our endeavors as well.  I'll update our opinions as we spend more time with it.

Hyrel System 30 Unboxing

http://www.hyrel3d.com/

We finally got the chance to unbox our new System 30 from Hyrel.  The people in Georgia worked very hard to get it to us in time for the OACTE conference and we received it just a day prior to leaving for Sunriver.  It was all I could do to wait for everyone to show up to open the box but it was well worth it.  The representatives from Hyrel cautioned us that we should not expect to have the machine up and printing as quickly as we may have liked but that didn't stop us.  Hyrel asked us to work with them via Skype for the initial assembly and start up in order to avoid any unnecessary issues but that would have meant waiting a couple hours for them to be available.  A bunch of CTE teachers really don't have the patience to wait when it comes to new machines so we gave it our best shot.

Initial assembly was straightforward and not too difficult.  We were all very pleasantly surprised with the fit and finish of the machine.  This is one very well thought out and engineered printer.  Everything about the machine screams quality.  This is a large and heavy printer when compared to our present arsenal.  Our students are going to have a unparallelled learning experience with this beauty.

We were able to make our first print without the assistance of Hyrel but I do plan on having my advanced students sit down with Hyrel for a Skype when they start it for the first time in the classroom.  They are going to learn so much from this initial session and I am looking forward to seeing it happen.
I should mention that the machine printed flawlessly for the entire presentation we gave at the conference.  There was a lot of interest in the machine and we are expecting that our machine will no longer be the only one in the state in a very short time.

Thanks again to everyone from Hyrel for their understanding and patience with us.  We look forward to a long and productive relationship with them.

Thank you Mark Dill; Extrusionbot!

Fresh back from the OACTE conference in Sunriver, Oregon.  We had the opportunity to meet Mark Dill from Extrusionbot and I can't remember the last time I have had the chance to speak with the owner of a company who was more excited about helping educators  in any way possible.  There were a lot of teachers and district representatives who spent time with him at his booth which made us all quite happy.  Mark has a fantastic product that can save schools and programs a ton of money.  This isn't the only plus though;  Students are going to have a chance to learn about the chemistry of filament extrusion, ratios, cost analysis just to name a few possibilities with the new machine.

Mark was there for us when our mouse failed at the start of our presentation and he took a few minutes to take questions from the group.  This gentleman and his company are going to be there for us for a long time to come and we look forward to learning as much as possible from Mark.

Extrusionbot first print

The new Extrusionbot produced it's first filaments before Spring Break.  Works great but we made a mistake in our ratio of PLA to colorant beads.  Way too much colorant made the filament too soft for use in printing.  The drive gear that feeds the filament into the extruder nozzle on the printer just couldn't grab it well enough.

As you can tell from the images above, the blue filament has the normal "bite" marks on it from the printing process.  The blue was commercially purchased (Matter Hackers 1.75mm PLA).  The orange filament is our first attempt at extruding with the Extrusionbot and we apparently used way too much colorant (it was a 2 to 1 mixture of PLA to colorant).  This softened the filament to the point that it compressed too much during the print process and the teeth of the drive gear bit into the filament way too much.  It also left an excessive amount of residue on the drive gear.  The stuff just wouldn't extrude.

We got in touch with Extrusionbot and they confirmed what we suspected regarding colorant ratios.  As an aside, this will be a GREAT opportunity to enlist our Science department (Chemistry in particular).  The chemical make-up of filaments is critical to their performance, effect on print temperatures, ability of the material to feed into the print nozzle, adherence to build plates and so on.

So we altered our ratios to approximately 4 to 1 PLA to colorant and started extruding.  The filament came out at a consistent 1.75 to 1.8 mm which is what is expected.  Now for the real test...does it print?  Well, yes it does! 

A student designed and printed a lid for the hopper on the Extrusionbot since we are in a pretty dusty environment here in the woodshop.  It works great and we are incredibly happy that we were able to extrude and print with our own filament after such a short time working with the E-bot (the new name our kids have given their Extrusionbot).  We have to take into consideration the fact that we are working not with a simple melting of plastic and spitting out weed whacker line.  What is occurring on this new machine is a highly complex fabrication of 3D printer filament from scratch.  This is not an easy thing to do without the proper machine.  The Extrusionbot is a fantastic piece of technology that our students are going to be using and learning from for a very long time.

Extrusionbot first impressions

We just got back from Spring break but just before we left the Extrusionbot unveiling took place.  To put it simply...Fantastic!  The students were all over the machine and following a few initial questions and issues (mainly due to the fact that we had 6 kids working together...) we had our first filament extruding.  Set up was simple and straightforward and the machine itself is very solid, well thought out and incredibly well made.

There was a small crowd visiting us for the unboxing including our own Principal, a Principal from another school, our curriculum director for the school district and even our Superintendent of Schools!  We also had our representative from the Southern Oregon Educational Services District and quite a few teachers from our school.  As you can imagine, everybody wanted to get their hands on the machine and help with the set-up.

We followed the instructions that came with the machine and within an hour or so we were printing filament!  We started with clear PLA and neon orange pellets at approximately a 2 to 1 ratio of PLA to colorant.  The folks at Extrusionbot sent us a bewildering array of raw materials to work with and we have a couple of students working on building extra spools to carry all of the new filaments we will be creating.

After a couple of errors on our part the filament was coming out perfectly.  We checked the diameter and it is coming out at a consistent 1.8mm which is what we expected to see.  This diameter matches what we have purchased in the past so it should work well with all of our machines.  We are going to start printing with the new filament this week and we will begin to record how it performs under differing conditions. 

Once again, a huge THANK YOU goes out to the folks at Extrusionbot for the exceptionally generous donation.  Our students are sooooo excited about the prospect of creating their own filaments and trying out different mixes.  The more they can make for themselves as opposed to buying material, the more they will learn.

We look forward to meeting the people at Extrusionbot during the OACTE conference next week in Sunriver, Oregon.  We plan on really showing the machine off to everybody there!

Extrusionbot is here!

Our new Extrusionbot is here!  A big thank you goes out to Gina and all of the folks at Extrusionbot in Chandler Arizona for the donation of the extrusion machine!!!  We can't begin to tell you all how nice it is to see businesses like yours supporting our kids in education.  No photos of it yet because we are going to let the students open up the box and get it up and running tomorrow.  The whole thing will be filmed and edited by our students in the video production department at the end of the day (thank you Chris Rosetta!).  You have no idea how difficult it is for the adults involved in this NOT to have opened up the box yet!  Alas, it is the students who should get first shot at it since they are the ones who will be using it every day.

Once we get all of the video completed and approved by all those involved we are going to post it on this blog as well as on You Tube.  We expect that Extrusionbot will have it on their website as well.

Check back with us in a few days for the unveiling!