About a week ago I received a kit for an Ultimaker, one of the many varieties of Open Source 3D printers currently available. Despite the documentation not being fully up-to-date I was able to assemble the printer in a day, and got good quality prints the next day. I will post some pictures and time-lapses soon.

I find it hard to maintain a blog even when you have cool things to post about, but sometime soon I'll figure out a routine that works.

-Mark

The DIY 3D Printing community, while rapidly growing, is still pretty young. In the pursuit of a good quality print one of he most important factors is getting your first layer to stick to the build platform. The common solution used by the community is to put blue painters tape onto the build platform. What the tape does is provide a texture that the plastic can stick to which can also be removed without too much effort. My problem with this tape solution is that it adds extra work to the printing process as well as creates a dependency on tape. Out of curiosity I tried to figure out some settings which would allow me to print directly onto the glass. You can see some of my results below the cut.

Ok, so maybe not so pretty, but here are a sampling of the things I've made so far with my Ultimaker.

This is a fan duct which is slightly improved over the stock one that came with the printer.

This container can be used to sort some of the odds and ends found in my room. And it's modular, so I can just print out more bins as needed.

This is a replacement extruder gear in case I need a spare (or want to build another printer).

Surprisingly I found that this bowl can hold water. And print quality should only increase from here.

More pictures are still to come. Still playing around with settings and getting things to print to glass consistently.