3D Printing

All very amazing. Have you got an image and wing span of the plane you building. If it is a wing I will be even more interested.

This is it?

Hi Brian
Yes resin has come along way . Very strong and the finish is outstanding quality. We use one at work for various design concepts. The resin still needs to come down in price but what you don’t use from the resin bath you can use again. You do have to clean the bath every time .

This is it Phil, the Eclipson EBW 160. There's another version, designed for FPV. It has all the whistles and bells for that particular discipline. Today, I downloaded the plan from Eclipson, the latest version has fins, they weren't on my download, so it must be a recent addition to the design. The wing reminds me of the Horten wings of WW2, they didn't have any vertical surfaces. I think that stability in the yaw axis is achieved by using lots of washout at the wing tips. As to whether it flies as well as they say it does remains to be seen. I have all the parts printed, but so far, HobbyKing haven't sent the glue I ordered a week ago, so I can't actually put the darned thing together.

Thanks for the info Alan, is there any flexibility in resin printing? Can you select a colour or mechanical spec for the print?

Yes Brian. As with our printers you can do the same and even more. Also a good selection of resin colours available but changing colour means washing the bath out every time.

Since my last entry back in August, my wife and I have been away. Since we came home I've done very little, apart from try to fire up some enthusiasm to finish printing the parts for the Blackwing. I checked the parts already made, and found that two months in a box hadn't improved things. The joint faces between the large sections in the centre of the wing are no longer flat and straight, and will need a bit of sanding to get a decent joint. Perhaps its a good thing that I didn't glue it together as soon as the parts came off the printer. The stress causing the distortion would have put a lot of extra load on the assorted joints, and most likely there would have been an in-flight failure at some point. Since I saw a couple of videos of the LabPrint Mig 15, I have been wondering whether printing a model is really all that its cracked up to be. One Mig didn't cope at all well with windy conditions on landing, and ended up severely damaged, when a conventional model would have shrugged off the "firm" arrival. The other video showed a Mig in flight, it wasn't flying fast. and it wasn't pulling a high "G" manoeuvre, it just shed a wing and broke up in the air on a conventional low fly past. So far I haven't found the glue that's used by the people that publish the designs. Watching the time lapse videos of various builds shows that the joints are literally swamped with glue, this is something that I thought more or less stopped the glue from curing, however the makers seem to spray on a great deal of "kicker" and even add more glue to the assembled joints. Using liberal amounts of cyano and kicker in a conventional shed would be impossible to tolerate unless a really good extractor fan was used. That would ensure that all the fumes and any warm air would be drawn out, the resulting icy draught would be uncomfortable to say the least, so assembling a model in the winter is going to be rather difficult. I don't think that epoxy or two pack acrylic would be practical due to the difficulty of mixing small amounts accurately, in any case, if those glues were practical, I think they'd be suggested in the build manuals. The last attempt at gluing wing sections together, I tried Loctite Power Flex super glue. This is a flexible glue, and I thought it would compensate for the movement of the rather flimsy sections. Its a gel glue and I used a series of "dots" instead of a continuous line, and I didn't use any accelerator. Although I had a fan for the fumes, I ended up with sore eyes and a runny nose for a day or so afterwards, and that was only a trial joint. I think perhaps printed aeroplanes might not be the best way for me, and I regret getting rid of all my balsa sheet, strip and plywood. Perhaps I'll be able to find something from Motion RC that appeals, their little EDF Mig 15 flew very well, but only for about half a minute before I completely lost it, however it may still fly again, a little shorter in the nose and more wrinkles than the average tortoise, at least it doesn't need cyano to hold it together.

Brian wrote: Perhaps I'll be able to find something from Motion RC that appeals, their little EDF Mig 15 flew very well, but only for about half a minute before I completely lost it, however it may still fly again, a little shorter in the nose and more wrinkles than the average tortoise, at least it doesn't need cyano to hold it together.

Welcome back to divided Britain.

Steam it Brian. Ask Simon O about Sabre crinkles. Although Tim Sullings did sort it out for him. Wonderful things kettles and glue.

I started this thread in the hope that I would eventually have a fairly cheap 3d printed model. I have had a few problems with the printer's extruder, finally I bought an upgrade kit for it and fitted the rebuilt extruder with a new "hot end". I thought that upgrading the extruder and upgrading the printer's software would have improved things a bit, I didn't realise just how long it takes to "tune" a printer! Since I started the project I've managed to turn about 4kg of PLA filament into unusable bits of what I thought would be either a P_47N with retracts, or the later project of the Black Wing 160. The project hasn't been a total waste of time and materials though. After a lot of emails to the model designers, I have a t last managed to get some of the printed parts aligned and glued. One "good thing" is that the cyano glue from HobbyKing not only works very well, but I seem to have no bad side effects from using it, and as a bonus you get quite a lot of it for the money.
Until recently, I believed that the problem I was having with the model printing was probably caused by my inexperience and initial failure to take any notice of what was written in the handbook. This week after some dialogue with the team at 3dLabPrint I found that the problems were being caused by the "slicer" program supplied by the printer's maker. To buy a program costs around $US 150, this program is used by the model's designers. I found a freely available one on the Internet which has most of the features of the American one, in fact I think it does about everything only a bit slower. It took a couple of days to get the general idea of how the program worked, and another couple of days tinkering with files and settings.The good thing was that the weather was awful, and the challenge took all my concentration, so what was going on outside didn't matter at all.
The first print took almost twenty hours to complete, and was not successful, the joints weren't straight as the wing sections had warped away from the build plate, and most of the internal detail was missing from the structure of the first wing section. I should have looked at the computer display a bit closer, then I would have seen what was going on, its easy to see when the print is examined in its individual layers.
The downloaded program from the designers is in several formats, the complete model is in G-Code, STL files and "factory" files. STL files are the ones I used. These files are representations of the parts of the model. Each part has to be added to the build plate of the printer then "sliced" to enable the printer to produce the part. Printing parts using the data from STL files enables the printer's settings to be adjusted to give the best results, unfortunately and for some reason the designer's haven't explained, the internal structure is removed when the part is prepared for printing. I was told to forget about STL files and slicing etc. and just use the G-Codes
Feeling a bit frustrated at spending so much time on what seemed to be wasted effort, I tried to print from the G-Codes, unfortunately, all the printer settings are embedded in the codes and editing things like speeds and temperature, material flow and retract distance is not possible.
If anyone would like a copy of my P-47N, and I don't think there's anything in the paperwork that prevents me from giving it away, and you'd like to have a go at it, send me your email address and I'll send you the files. You'll be able to download all the other info you need from the 3dLabPrint website.

Finally I gave in and bought the expensive printer control program, fortunately there is a "get out" option and I can get a refund up to 20 days from the original purchase. I felt a bit uncomfortable using the program as I really didn't want to have to learn another set of disciplines. However, after a fair bit of head scratching and stop-start programming, at long last the printer produced a pretty good print. Suitably encouraged, I went ahead and printed all ten sections of the P-47 wing. Today I started to fit the parts together, there's a small amount of "fettling" to do on the mating surfaces, not a lot, but must be done with some care as the wing skins are only 0.40 mm thick. The first three sections of the right wing went together just as described in the manufacturer's videos. I started to feel a bit relaxed about the whole thing. I should have paid more attention when I loaded the files to the printer. For some reason, one section of the wing was too big by roughly 10%. I haven't a clue how this could have happened. I've deleted the appropriate files and re-written them, the printer is now working away in the dark and , I hope its printing the section to the correct scale. The photos are of the oversized wing section, finish is pretty good, the views of the end sections show just how thin the wing skin is. The thickened section is the end that goes on to the build plate, the extra width helps to prevent the part from warping away from the plate during the print process by giving more surface area to "grip" the build plate.This widened section is formed by adding five layers outside the wing profile.

Clever stuff!