First installment to our parts gallery, some of the Mendel parts we’ve been printing:
These are the y bearing, bed height spacer and x/z bearing plate. We’re pretty happy with them. We are aiming to build the highest quality parts possible, particularly in relation to build speed and total build time. These were all done at a base feed rate of 25mm/s.
One of the components to better build quality is use a stepper motor to drive the filament into the extruder, and we’ve tuned the motor to do very specific retractions to prevent ooze. But as you can see, we still get tiny blobs at the ends of lines (as seen in the small bumps on the edges of parts). So we are still working on the ‘perfect’ extruder. We build our own extruder heads and heater blocks, which is another important part – retractions only work with certain geometries.
Here is a short video of a bed height spacer being printed. We particularly enjoy the printer’s quiet operation.
All in all, printing Mendel parts has been a great learning tool.
