I got some TPU filament to print some parts for my Quadcopter.

I got some TPU filament to print some parts for my Quadcopter. After i was pretty amazed by the stability and behaviour of this material i got the idea to print some softmounts for my Flightcontroller to get rid of vibrations. The first parts where hard to print because i used a 0.4mm nozzle and some important walls were 0.3mm thick, nearly impossible with a 0.4nozzle. But they worked, not as good as i wanted but still ok… A day later i thought… you could use a smaller nozzle and print better softmounts…i did…printed those (pic1-3) with a 0.2nozzle and they work great.

Then a friend asked for some softmounts too, but he is using bigger softmounts so i got another idea… Printing M3 softmounts with inner and outer thread… I did that too… or still doing…need to tweak my printer a lil bit better…*I already made another 3dmodel, the pictures show my old designs.

The picture with only the outer thread was my last testprint and it works very good.
The last picture are different testprints screwed together. Threads this small are rly hard to print well and they probably would look and work alot better with a more stable printer than my stock AnetA8 (no printed parts for stability its just that cheap printer with acrylic frame) but im impressed by the results i got only from tweaking the settings.
Layerheigths are 0.04mm probably going to test 0.03mm.

That’s really cool! I haven’t tried printing with flex material yet.

@John Bump
To be honest this material is awesome… After some minor changes in my extruder it was very easy to print. I stopped my first testprint after 5min because everything looked great. My first part was nearly perfect after some smaller changes in the slicer settings. Even with 0.2 nozzel it prints very good.
Important is that your extrudergear should be as close as possible to the feedingtube for the heater. With bowdenextruder it will be hard to print i think.

Yeah, I have a bowden, but I built shims to fit in the spaces where it could get loose, so I could print wax filament. This stuff is soft enough I might need a new print head, though. Thanks for the review!

Yeah, big problem with bowden and flex stuff is that this material gets pushed together easy or bend when retracting and also has a high friction in your tube.
This causes alot if problems but i have seen that its possible when you tweak your printer alot, not the best results but good enough.

I have never printed wax, actually im going to look what kind of material it is​:joy::joy:

Ahhh i thought wax was standing for something but its realy wax​:joy::joy::joy:… That is cool to​:+1:

I have made alot of quadcopter bits out of TPU they have turned out really good. I have been using a Bowden setup the only downfall I have is I have to print really slow generally around 15mm per sec

@michael_hughes ahh cool, yeah i thought changes in speed would help alot.

Nice parts. I have a tip for you. Pure rubber, or TPU will dampen vibration in some frequencies, and resonate in others. Now if put some gel, or fluid among the part infill(by pausing the print before top layer) your dampener will get visco-elastic properties, and dissipate much more vibration energy.

@Eduardo_Schoenknecht that would not be possible in this case. First of all the fluid would need to be between inner and outer thread but there is no space to do this, the screw also would lose alot of stability.
If i could make the softmounts bigger to do this i couldnt even fill in the correct amount of liquid without a maschine( the amount of liquid i need would be around 0.000056Liters or 56mm³)
Also the vibrations i get are from 4 motors with high rpm wich turn propellers, means these are high frequent vibs those are bad for my Gyroscope. With tpu and the design i get them to a lower frequenz and damped that much that it will not cause problems anymore.

In theory your tip would work. in reallife i dont have the possibility, space and time for that shit​:joy::joy::joy::+1: but its also not necessary​:wink:

But thank you anyways✌