What a great toy you’ve got there. Would the plastic be tough enough to hold up to the typical fine threads of a battery tube, and can it reproduce such fine threads?
I'm not sure if the tube is robust enough for me to even sell to people. I did a torture test dropping it on concrete and carpet and the weak point turned out to be the threads, the entire cap broke off with the threads inside after tossing it up to the ceiling because it's the thinnest part of the design. The resolution of the printer is quite high 0.15mm (150 microns), the problem is just that too thin of a thread would break. While it may be ABS plastic, it's printed in fine layers so it's not as strong as a solid piece. I'll probably print some out and send out some samples if you guys really want them.
i could be wrong, but in plastic i think threads and thin sections are always going to be weak points
I was chatting with another member a while back about 3D printing, and one thing no one ever mentions about it is that the pieces often have less strength then an identical item with the same material made by conventional means (but of course you need no molds and you can make unique shapes with a 3d printer)
yes you did, i meant outside of BLF, all the news stories out there promote its strengths but ignores its weaknesses, i had no idea about reduced strength till recently
a while back i was thinking of a few products to get made, it kinda deflated my ideas when i found out about the actual limitations, but there are a few items i do still want built someday, and i’ve seen some websites that have uploaded plans and you can choose from a few different materials, there are some very unique creations to choose from
While it isn't the strongest I wouldn't call it light usage either, I only managed to break it after throwing it up and down several times with a battery indoors and outdoors. Supposedly the materials we use already come with specific recommended temperatures, deviating up and down cause the material to either not stick to the print plate or become extremely difficult ot remove from the support structure. Experimentation is always ongoing but long print times discourage it.
Did you print the whole tube with full material or did you used the honeycomb structure?
I also thought about making a battery tube which can be screwed to a mr16bulb.
But designing these 3D models is hard if you are new to it.
All the free programs are not very good for technical designs with threads and so on, so I used solidworks which is really complex but also made for this things…
This was the first try of a tailcap never had enough ambition to get this project done completely…as you can see I let a bit stand over of non threaded material because I thought that might increase stability…
The big advantage of scad is the flexibility with the parameters, but I don’t like to design a product with a text based program…