Category Archives: abs

Anti-Lock Brakes for Bike Might Make Rides a Little Safer

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Crashing one’s bike is a childhood rite of passage, one that can teach valuable lessons in applied physics. Assuming the kid is properly protected and the crash is fairly tame, scrapes and bruises are exchanged for the wisdom to avoid sand and gravel patches, and how to avoid a ballistic dismount by not applying the front brakes harder than or before the rear brakes.

But for many of us, those lessons were learned long ago using a body far more flexible than the version we’re currently in, and the stakes are higher for a bike ride that includes braking mistakes. …read more

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ABS: Three Plastics in One

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It would be really hard to go through a typical day in the developed world without running across something made from ABS plastic. It’s literally all over the place, from toothbrush handles to refrigerator interiors to car dashboards to computer keyboards. Many houses are plumbed with pipes extruded from ABS, and it lives in rolls next to millions of 3D-printers, loved and hated by those who use and misuse it. And in the form of LEGO bricks, it lurks on carpets in the dark rooms of children around the world, ready to puncture the bare feet of their parents.

ABS …read more

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The Filament Pelletizer For Fused Granular Fabrication

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The ABS and PLA that goes into your 3D printer is sold in two forms. The first, naturally, is filament. The second is plastic granules, the raw material for your filament, and costs an order of magnitude less than the filament itself. For years we’ve been seeing machines that either print directly with plastic granules or are converted into filament with fancy filament-extruding machines. Now we can do it the other way. [Aubrey Woern] and [Joshua Pearce] of Michigan Tech have been working on a polymer pelletizer chopper that takes plastic filament and turns it into pellets.

The system uses …read more

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Tariff Expansion Set to Hit 3D-Printing Right in the Filament

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Mere weeks after tariffs were put into place raising the cost of many Chinese-sourced electronics components by 25%, a second round of tariffs is scheduled to begin that will deal yet another blow to hackers. And this time it hits right at the heart of our community: 3D-printing.

A quick scan down the final tariff list posted by the Office of the US Trade Representative doesn’t reveal an obvious cause for concern. In among the hundreds of specific items listed one will not spot “Filaments for additive manufacturing” or anything else that suggests that 3D-printing supplies are being targeted. But …read more

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Results of 3D-Printed Cylinder Head Testing Fail to Surprise

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It’s the suburbanista’s weekend nightmare: you’re almost done with the weekly chores, taking the last few passes with the lawn mower, when you hear a pop and bang. The cylinder head on your mower just blew, and you’re out of commission. Or are you? You’ve got a 3D printer – couldn’t it save the day?

If this bench test of plastic cylinder heads is any indication, it’s possible – just as long as you’ve only got 40 seconds of mowing left to do. [Project Farm] has been running all sorts of tests on different materials as field-expedient cylinder heads for …read more

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An MRI-Safe 3D Printed Pneumatic Stepper Motor

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You will no doubt have seen those videos where MRI machines suck up all sorts of metallic objects with hilariously disastrous results. The magnetic field in one of these machines can easily pull in metal objects from across the room, exerting a force of several hundred pounds on any ferrous object unlucky enough to wander too close. As you can probably imagine, designing mechanical devices that can operate in such an intense magnetic field is exceptionally difficult.

But this fully 3D printed pneumatic stepper motor designed by [Foad Sojoodi Farimani] might one day change that. The PneuAct, which he presented …read more

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A 3D-Printed Bowl Feeder for Tiny SMD Parts

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[Andrzej Laczewski] has something big in mind for small parts, specifically SMD resistors and capacitors. He’s not talking much about that project, but from the prototype 3D-printed bowl feeder he built as part of it, we can guess that it’s going to be a pretty cool automation project.

Bowl feeders are common devices in industrial automation, used to take a big pile of parts like nuts and bolts and present them to a process one at a time, often with some sort of orientation step so that all the parts are the right way around. They accomplish this with a …read more

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Pool Ball Return System Chalked Up To Ingenuity

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Do you play pool? If so, you probably take the automatic ball return systems in bar and billiard hall tables for granted. [Roger Makes] was tired of walking around his home table to collect the balls every time he wanted to play, so he designed a time-saving ball return system.

Instead of falling into the little netted baskets that came with the table, the balls now drop into 3D-printed pockets and ride along dowel rod rails into a central collection box, which is suspended by straps beneath the rack-em-up end of the table. The rails themselves are fortified with ABS …read more

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Repairs You Can Print: A Little Love for the Glove Box

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A few years ago, [Brieuc]’s car blew a fuse. He went to replace it, which unfortunately means removing the entire glove box. In his haste to get his baby back on the road, he accidentally broke one of the clips that holds the glove box on the dashboard.

[Brieuc] tried to just glue the thing back together, but it didn’t hold because the part has to flex a little bit for people who need to get into the fuse box. No one seems to offer a replacement for this small but vital hunk of plastic, though he did find someone …read more

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The Latest In 3D Printed Part Smoothing: Use A Brush

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Part smoothing for 3D printed parts, especially parts printed in ABS, has been around for a while. The process of exposing an ABS part to acetone vapor turns even low-resolution prints into smooth, glossy 3D renderings that are stronger than ever. The latest improvement in part smoothing for 3D printed parts is now here: use a brush. Published in Nature‘s Scientific Reports, researchers at Waseda University have improved the ABS + acetone part smoothing process with a brush.

According to the authors of the paper, traditional filament-based printing with ABS has its drawbacks. The grooves formed by each layer …read more

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