“Gear Down For What” channel printed a differential gear out of Nylon X, a carbon-fiber impregnated Nylon.
He paused the print to put captive nuts in, and it ultimately caused a delamination issue and we didn’t get to see the full capabilities/torture test of the plastic. Hoping he comes back to this with a proper fully printed differential gear because it was working.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kd4ZLn-Ouw
Spoiler alert: It doesn’t, but not because of a failure of the carbon fiber infused nylon. It’s the design of the part which was simplistic and failed to account for the weakness induced by the gear construction process. It was never going to work, but it could have if it had been done differently.
@Charles-A_Rovira It DID work after the JB-weld…but only for a short while because nothing sticks to Nylon. So yeah - if reprinted better, it certainly could work for a while. It’s a really exciting experiment.
I say he does it again with your suggestions, perhaps even considering annealing it (taking part shrinking Noah’s into consideration)… if he got this far, maybe it’s up to us to show how we can do it better!!
Very cool
Brook
I posted two options on the video. I personally have had trouble printing threads, so I like extra perimeters and then hand threading. That is the first option that I mentioned.
I wonder how vacuum forming around two sides of such a part would turn out. It should definitely help prevent delamination. Especially if you bake the part lightly…which should help just by itself. I am sure you would lose some detail even if the part was designed to be vacuum formed over though.
I am suspicious about infused filaments as this is whole diffrent matter and they are new and it will require sometime. But there is a video of two guys that successfully made and replace propeller of a small gasoline boat with Polimaker PCMAX and on full throttle it survived without noticable damage. Pretty amazing for 3d print cosidering that they used 80 hourse power engine or something like that.
I’v e found with Nylon you need to keep the build chamber hot. You will probably do better to enclose your printer with polystyrene, get rid of drafts. Then, when you restart the print ensure that the part has time to heat up to the normal build plate temperature. The surface you are restarting at must be hot enough to bond - set the extrusion temp close to the highest your filament will take for the first layer. Any temperature variance will result in uneven contraction, shear and delamination.
This is a use-case scenario that would work with E3D’s new movement/multi-head system. Print in Nylon and have a pick-n-place tool as one of the other heads.
I found in all cases I have used infused (chopped fibre) filaments that they are overall, weaker than the original plastic. More rigid but weaker.
The exception being the Mark Two (or whatever it’s called) printer that lays down continuous strands of fibre. This has under stress testing shown to be much much stronger than plain plastic but the printer costs your first born child and then some.
Printed out of equally rigid and tough plastic like polycarbonate it might have survived for a little bit longer and maybe restarting the continouation layer at a higher temperature and slower speed will help re-melt the last layer for better bonding.
@Pieter_Koorts Markforged. Nice machines. We almost bought one for the shop, then went a different way.