Camera battery door - smallest part ever!

My camera has a battery door which is held closed by a little plastic lever, and it broke. I figured if the part was even available from Olympus, it would cost $10 plus shipping and would take a week or so to get here. Thingiverse to the rescue! Someone else had already designed the part and shared it on line. That's great, because some aspects of it are really small and I wasn't looking forward to designing it from scratch.

A sample part printed with a 0.25mm nozzle came out rather lumpy, so I wanted to use my smallest nozzle, 0.15mm. I've used it before, but it's so small it can be finicky. My previous project was printed in Nylon, which takes a lot of heat... and can be hard to clean out of the hotend. Sure enough, it caused the worst clogs I've ever seen. I could sometimes get some cleaning filament through, but it would repeatedly gum up again. The 0.25 nozzle was clogged and I had to use a heat gun and some very small cleaning wires to get it clear. Then the "heat break" portion of the hotend was also clogged. I had to use a drill bit and some careful hammer taps to get it cleared. 

I finally figured out that the hotend was not getting as hot as it used to, barely reaching the temperature needed to melt the Nylon. So there was not enough heat to permeate the whole hotend and nozzle, which explains why I could not get it cleaned out well. Fortunately I also have some 0.15mm cleaning wires, which are really hard to insert. I finally got it working well enough to get residual PLA out of the 0.15 nozzle and do some test prints.

This is a very small part:

Simplfy3D calculated that it used 0.19 of a gram of plastic.

The good news is that it fit and worked perfectly on the camera:

While I had the printer loaded up I printed a half-dozen more units and offered them to people in a couple of my online Olympus-related photography groups. At only 0.19 gram, I can mail two of them in an envelope with one stamp!

Afterward I ordered a new heater element from partsbuilt.com and installed it. The hotend now heats up at least 50% faster and can go well beyond the required heat for Nylon.

Closet Door Spacers / Guides

A friend was painting and recarpeting some bedrooms, and each room had the same style of sliding closet doors. He found that the plastic spacers or guides on the top of the doors had deteriorated and needed to be replaced. Do you know how many different manufacturers there are for home products? Lots! Do you know how many of them are still in business and supplying spare parts? Almost none! The guy at the hardware store just shook his head.

This is the same friend who specified the custom electrical box last year, so he thought Aha! Roger could make them. In fact, this is exactly the kind of project that got me interested in 3D printing in the first place: making irreplaceable parts. He's an engineer, so he carefully measured the old parts and gave me a detailed drawing. 

These were quite little, just over an inch in the biggest dimension. I put chamfers on all the corners so they would insert easily into the extruded aluminum frames. This view is upside-down: the square part is the "guide" which extends beyond the aluminum frame and keeps it from rattling back and forth.

I decided to print them in Taulman Bridge Nylon, because it is tough (resisting wear) and relatively low friction for moving parts.

I printed about three cycles of samples, refining the width of the insert part and the guide part. 

He needed 12 parts: 2 ends x 2 doors x 3 rooms. As with the previous project, I used Simplify3D's Sequential Print to produce several units per print job. Because the Nylon requires high heat I avoided the cooler areas of my heated bed.

Simplest design ever - mass produced!

I was approached by the head custodian at our church about 3D printing some parts. On the back of every pew there are several wooden holders with room for books, papers, pencils, and holes to receive 4 empty communion cups. You know those little glass or plastic cups? Each of the 4 cup holes has - or had - a plastic insert. I think the main purpose is to soften the noise of the cup being set down, and maybe prevent the glass (in the old days) from being scratched by the wood? Whatever, the plastic had deteriorated over the years and many of the inserts had broken and been discarded.

Simplest design ever! It's just a cylinder about 3/4 inch high, with a flange on top. I printed a few samples, varying the cylinder outside diameter by a millimeter. We tested them for fit and picked the right size. The holes in the wood were quite consistent.

I needed to print about 200 units. Simplify3D has a feature which can print multiple units in order, rather than printing all the units at one time, one layer at a time. This eliminates the stringing that would occur if the head repeatedly moved from part to part. You have to create a "Process" for each unit you want to print, then select them all to be printed, then choose Sequential Printing. You need to space the parts out enough that the components of the printer's hotend will not hit any previously printed units. In this case the parts are not very tall, so it is a pretty easy layout. I was able to print 16 units per print job.

I had some brown PLA on hand which blended perfectly with the wood color. Each job took just under 3 hours. They all printed very cleanly and needed no post-processing. I delivered them over a couple of weeks and the whole set cost about $12.