Elephant drainer version 2

I wanted to make an elephant drainer for my daughter. Her sink has a bit of a lip, and the current elephant's trunk lays flat on the surface. If the trunk sat on the lip, it would tilt the whole thing backwards and would not drain. So I revisited the design in Fusion 360 and lifted the trunk upward. Unfortunately that meant I needed to recreate the hole through the trunk. I printed a sample of the bottom part and found it needed to be lifted more. It was difficult to reshape it any more, so instead I rotated the front legs down, lifting the head and body off the ground. The downside of that is that it then required support structures under the whole belly, head, and trunk. That would take more time and plastic, but I went ahead with that design.

I thought I had enough of the nice silver (actually gray) PET-G filament, but it ran out about two-thirds of the way up.





















It would look funny, and the divider is designed for the full height. So... I guess I have a flowerpot (with drainage).












Unfortunately Micro Center no longer stocks that PET-G silver, which is too bad because it really prints nicely. I went on line and found eSUN Silk PLA. I printed this helix as a test. Look how silky smooth and shiny!










But that test object prints in one continuous smooth curve. No stops and starts. In real life I had a lot of problems with globs and gaps. I messed around a lot with temperature, retraction, etc. trying to improve it. I don't really remember the solution, but it eventually smoothed out a bit.









Failures #1 and 2 were that it did not stick well to the bed.

Failures #3, 4, and 5 were that it would fail to feed, causing skips large and small. The small skips just caused unattractive dark lines of missing filament, visible on the side just above the top of the leg. The large skips caused subsequent layers to fail to adhere completely!

I used up the whole spool of filament and never got a successful print. I posted my experience in the review section for the product on Amazon.




Back to Micro Center for an alternative gray. They had Inland PLA+ Silver which looked pretty good. It's actually gray, slightly shinier than the Inland PET-G.  Rather than start out with the elephant, I printed several test cubes and cylinders. It took some futzing, cleaning and lubing of my machine, adjusting temperature, speed, and extrusion width to get a clean print. Were those adjustments the cause of the failures on the eSUN Silk? I don't think so... I think the eSUN Silk had variations in the density or melting point, causing it to temporarily clog and then restart printing.

I had one early adhesion failure, which was fixed by reapplying Magigoo. I eventually got a completed print.

So what is PLA+ ? Apparently it can mean whatever the manufacturer wants it to mean. Different filaments have different additives. In this case, the final product is *really* tough. The divider needs to be bent a bit to insert it, and I had to print it thinner than usual to have any hope of bending it enough.

Ironically, from hints on the Internet and in the packaging, it seems that Micro Center's "Inland" house brand is produced by eSUN. So the PET-G I liked, and the PLA Silk I hated, and the PLA+ I eventually used, with different results, are all eSUN products.

It's not as smooth as the Inland PET-G, but not too bad. And as my wife pointed out, real elephants aren't exactly smooth.