Originally posted by Rob Wilson on April 4, 2019
OK, so today was not Tuesday, but Friday. A belated April fools for all you readers.
Marc was working on a design in Fusion 360 to make a jig for a project he is working on. Helped him on some methods to use Fusion. Then we worked on setting up the print on our LulzBot. For some reason, Cura was being obstinate.
Sally came by with some update for her project that she is working on. She needs some text around a circle. We worked with Adobe Illustrator and Gimp and Fusion 360 to develop a test print. I used my copy of Simplify3D to look at a preview. In Fusion, we found out that the text was slightly oval. We then went through various hoops to create a SVG file. Fusion appears to be finicky about the SVG format. or maybe it is about the converter.
I had created a overhang file to test the capability of the 3d printer to find out the ability to print unsupported angles. For giggles, I tried to print it. Apparently, stopping the printer and restarting the Cura application worked. The model is designed to find out what the printer can print unsupported.
This allows us to save print time and filament.
Our standard Lulzbot can print pretty well up to 70 degree overhang.
It can do some plain jane horizontal, with penalty of too much drop down.
I have another project with my home 3-d printer. I have lost heads because an overnight print started balling around the head and the plastic went into the head and wires. Very ugly. So I went and cut some aluminum flashing into a rough shield. So needing an excuse to try aluminum cutting on the XCarve, and learning how to use the sheet metal tool in Fusion 360, i designed a cutout to machine on the XCarve. I spent some time tweaking the CAM parameters. Then I broke the bit, because the aluminum was not bowing off the table. Que sera sera.
As a post comment, I found out a method of creating a SVG file directly from GIMP.