Based of other recent posts I decided to try some new flex PLA filament I have to test the body. It took a while to dial in my printer to avoid stringing and getting the bridges right. I had to print really slow at about 15mm/sec which took 15 hours to print this microscope body.
More importantly is indestructible! see my crash test:
Spectacular!
Now you should combine the videos with the soundtrack, irish version ;- )
Follow up on this experiment. The body fully printed on flex PLA was impossible to assemble. The screws and nuts difficult to fit into the holes and too wabbly.
So I tried a hybrid approach combining the flex pla only for the bottom flexure (white) and regular pla (blue)
The backlash is terrible and impossible to work with.
With modern multi material printers I wonder if only printing the flexures in TPU would actually be feasible. For the best results the flexure probably should not be at the top and bottom of body so the TPU can be sandwiched between hard material. But that should work even with a unmodified body if the slicer creates a mesh between the PLA and the TPU.
With more bendable flexures we could increase the range of motion for the stage by increasing the height of the actuator columns and feet.
Tried that too but it is very unstable. TPU and PLA don’t blend at all so I have to use flexible PLA to achieve adhesion between the 2. AT first I tried just 2 layers of flexible TPU and it was really bad. The stage movement was terrible. Very unstable and a lot of backlash. The images show my last print using 8mm thickness of the white flexible PLA in an attempt of making it more stiff. it did not work as expected. The movement is very unstable.
