Pillars of Hercules

November 28th, 2008 Comments Off on Pillars of Hercules

Here’s an updated Sketchup (for the new version 7) for the Hercules extruder.

The compact design of this extruder lends itself to stacking. By stacking two extruders, you can print with multiple materials. Why would you need two materials? A printed object at the very least needs a ‘raft’ – a lower fidelity flat area to which the object prints.

The first layer is in contact with the elevation system, which is of a different material than the object. This causes the first layer to behave unpredictably. Further layers become more consistent and allow higher fidelity strands to be laid. Objects with overhangs also need support material. In order to separate the support and raft material from the final object, you can print with different materials such as HDPE for the raft and ABS for the object. You could theoretically use two different temperatures for the raft and object materials.

I call this stacked extruder Pillars of Hercules

Here’s the sketchup of the Pillars of Hercules extruder

(I have no intention of building this anytime soon, it was just a fun exercise while crashed on the couch sick as a dog).

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