April | 2015 | Anim4Bot

Hi !

So, I have been doing some prints during the weekend… and it’s not as easy as expected 😕 First of all, the PVA filament. It requires a lot of tests and tuning in order to print it correctly, up to now the PVA is still giving me hard work so I’m unfortunately not using it for the supports… so for the moment I print them in PLA.

The other thing is the print quality. As I want Animabot to look as close as possible to the rendering, I need very clean parts and if possible without visible layers. To get to this, I will have to sand the parts with a tumbler, apply a filler, then sand again and finally paint ! lot of work in perspective, but this is the price for a good-looking 😀

I have been able to print the gears and the board support without any issues because they have simple shape:

Head gears

Gear mounted on servo’s head

Boards support

The femur is the next part to print, I had to increase a bit the width of the walls to get it more rigid. The femur is printed with a 0,1mm layer resolution and result is very good even if it needs to be a little sanded or polished. There is a gap between both parts, it’s because the motor’s supports are a bit higher due to the printed supports… not all residues have been removed 😦 as you can also see, cables just fit tight inside ! no more space 😉