Hey Folks, Alan Mandic, MandicReally here.
Have you ever wanted to 3D print in a car, in traffic?
Or do you not have a screw loose?
Well, lucky for you, I do!
So we're going to find out in this video how well it works...
Let's check it out!
Quick warning: DO NOT Try This At Home.
I am a trained professional.
I'm not necessarily trained in whatever the heck this is,
but I am trained in some stuff.
Let's first talk about the why of this situation.
This past weekend, we had an art market here in Philadelphia called Krampus Fest.
It was put on by a couple of really good friends of mine,
and they offered up a booth space to me
to put on a display of my Can Cup designs for folks.
My partner, TheRubyGore, and I even designed this new Krampus
themed Can Cup
that was going to be available at the show and available for the holiday season.
When we got the booth, we requested one that had access to power
so we could have a running 3D printer there at the show.
It was both going to grab people's attention who aren't familiar with 3D
printing on a day to day basis and correlate
what it is we do with the objects on display.
Now the problem comes in.
What was I going to print on that printer?
The obvious thing would be one of the Krampus cups,
but these take somewhere between 20 to 24 hours per
cup to print, depending on speed settings, blah blah blah.
I thought I could scale this design down and make it fit
within the 5 hour window of the show from start to finish.
But I know from personal experience
that larger prints are what really catch people's attention.
So instead, I decided to go BIG.
We scaled up the Krampus to 150%,
turning it into a 42 hour print, according to PrusaSlicer's estimate.
So I started it on Friday night for the Sunday show.
And that pretty directly rolls
us into the equipment we used for this little experiment.
My first thought was to use my Ender 5 Plus as it's the only non bed-slinger
printer that I own, and I felt like
that would handle the bumps and rattles down the road the best.
However, it's just too d@mn BIG.
The next logical choice was my Prusa i3,
but I'm going to say it right here right now, I'm not a Prusa fanboy.
Despite the fact that I've already preordered a Prusa XL...
Also, I was running that machine
doing production for going to the show, so I would have inventory.
So I didn't necessarily want to take it out of the rotation of that,
as whatever machine I did use was not going to be doing production
for 2 days leading up to the show.
That brings us to the machine
that I actually chose the other machine with a mouthful of a name, the Fokoos
Tech Odin-5 F3 Folding FDM 3D printer.
This seems the logical choice because it's a folding 3D printer.
It transports easily,
except I need it running while we're going,
so that actually eliminates one of the main reasons
why people would want to transport this machine.
OK, real talk about why I chose that machine.
It's the only other machine I have that has dual Z-axis lead screws
and stepper motors to really hold the x axis gantry in place.
Also, the Y-axis rails are set decently far apart for a stable bed platform,
and the X-axis gantry is 40 mm wide
to really have a nice stable hold on that direct drive extruder.
Quick side note this video is NOT sponsored by the folks who Fokoos Tech.
I know I'm sounding like I'm listing off
all these glowing things about that machine,
but I'm just telling you why I chose it for this little mini experiment.
That machine was provided to me by the folks at Fokoos Tech,
but again, this is NOT sponsored by them.
And if you're looking to hear some negatives
about that machine, get Subscribed because I do have some thoughts about it
and I will be reviewing it in the near future.
With the machine chosen, it was time to figure out
how I was actually going to transport this.
The most obvious answer would be to just unplug it while it's printing.
Head over to the show.
Plug it back in and hope that the Power Resume
function kicks back in like it should and picks up where it left off.
Those features can work beautifully when a machine stops
what it's doing right where it is and just sits there.
But then you have to worry
about the bad cooling down and the print releasing from the bed.
You have to worry about something moving, whether it be the Z-axis wiggling down
a little bit because there is no longer power on the stepper motors.
The X/Y-axis homing properly once they re pick up
where they're starting from again, there's a lot of things that can go wrong
in that scenario, and I really don't like doing that
in a controlled environment, let alone driving down the road.
So the in com,es of the CyberPower 1500va
UPS Battery Backup.
Now I do run a handful of my 3D printers off of these battery backup units
in case I have little power outages while I'm doing small production runs
or just prototyping stuff.
I don't want to have a failed print
just because the neighborhood had a 15 second blackout for a while.
I have wondered
how long can I run one or multiple printers off of one of these units?
If you're interested in the answer to that question hit the Subscribe button
because I fully intend on deeper diving into this with different size UPS,
different quantities of printers, and we will be revisiting this in the future.
And all of that leads us to... Let's do this!
We're going vlog style now because, well, this is all just going to be interesting.
We're going to have to make do because we've got to move this thing
and my partner is going to be the camera person
for a second which isn't normally her duty.
So let's get to this.
Unplugging.
Can you take this?
'The Rock' is coming with us,
we're going to need moral support.
Who better than 'The Rock'?
Here we go.
Good time for it to beep.
You can come on.
OK. That's how we're going.
Oh, OK.
This is extremely hard to film and whatever,
but we're here in the car.
I'm just steadying the machine so that it doesn't go anywhere
on Philadelphia roads and we are headed to the event space.
Philadelphia roads are just perfect for this.
Absolutely the best test for this experiment.
All right, UPS is currently reading
35 minutes time left, 25 minutes, 26 minutes,
and four out of
five bars of battery capacity.
We have got plenty of time.
I'm definitely seeing some print quality
issues here, but that's to be expected.
So we will we will dissect those as we go forward.
Maybe we could build an in-car suspension system for this thing.
So like this won't happen.
We are arriving at the space now. Hi.
I'll just get this on the table
& come right back.
Still got 4 bars of battery life left.
It's saying we could run for another 300 minutes, so
the heaters must not really be very active at the moment, down 21 minutes.
And with that,
we made it.
Now we actually have
set up the rest of our booth.
We did it.
We made it. We're all set up.
And here people are checking out the Krampus Cup printing here live.
I'll go back to the studio and we'll talk about the intricacies of this.
What happened because there was
some slight issue with it and we'll take a look at it.
How much there was, when we get back.
The event is about half an hour away from being done and the print is not
so if we factor in like maybe a few percent off from the slicer estimate,
which was 42 hours, we're currently at 42 hours
and 44 minutes, so it's probably more like 44 hour print at this point.
So I just dial up the speed 5% and hopefully that'll pick it up
enough to finish before we are done loading up and getting out of here.
OK, now
we're actually heading back to the studio and you'll see what happened from there.
So it's been a few days now since the show.
Let's talk about what happened, how it went and what issues
popped up with actually printing while driving down the road.
You can clearly see that this thing did actually successfully finish.
It finished about 15-20 minutes after the end of the show
while we were packing up.
The only thing that you can really see on this print is a clearly defined line,
right at like the base of the horns, top of the head.
That is where we were transporting it down the road.
It's not necessarily a layer shift.
It kind of looks like it could be, and you can feel it, but if it is a layer
shift, it's almost like it shifted one way, then shifted back multiple times.
It kind of staggered a few layers
and then basically corrected itself and kept on going.
In preparation for this,
before I ever started this print, I tightened the belts on the Odin-5.
I leveled the bed nice and fresh, tightened it down
as good as I could to load the springs
so they would have a really good solid base to be working off.
I tightened up all of the frame screws that I could reach.
So everything was good and tight and solid, so
I wouldn't have any shifting any movement while we were driving down the road.
The only thing that could shift and move was,
of course, the moving components of the machine.
Which is where the little bit of inconsistency came in here.
Honestly, for what it is that we did, and if you are familiar
with Philadelphia roads,
I think this did pretty darn well.
Now there is a glaring problem at the top of the haunts, but that is my fault.
That actually wasn't the fault of driving down the road
or the return trip or anything like that.
When I picked the machine
up off of the table as we were packing up the hot end collided
with my hand and skipped steps, causing a major layer shift.
You can see that one or two shifted layers there,
and then I actually corrected it by just grabbing the hot end and holding it
in position and forcing it to skip back the other direction.
Overall, this was a fun experiment.
I did actually pretest a little bit.
I still don't know the max capacity of one of those UPS,
but before I started this print, I was running the Odin-5 off of the UPS,
I unplugged it and then let it run with a stopwatch running.
I got down to one bar of battery life left on the UPS and I called it done
there, which was about 36 minutes of run time at that point.
In fact,
I don't know exactly how long it took us to get there on the day of the market,
but we had still four bars of battery life
left on the UPS when we arrived at the show and plugged it in.
All right folks, I think that's going to wrap it up for this video.
It was just a silly, fun, little "experiment" I wanted to put on.
I needed to transport this thing to demonstrate it at the show.
I felt that the bigger print was just going to be much more interesting
to see than even the standard scale version would for folks.
So I had to do something to get it there.
All right folks, have you found this video interesting?
If you did, please drop it LIKE it really helps out.
Let me know in the COMMENTS. Was this pointless?
Have you done something like this?
Let me know what you're thinking in the COMMENTS down below.
Get SUBSCRIBED if you're interested in more Maker
content, "Experiments" like this or actually informative ones.
Thanks for coming around folks, and KEEP ON MAKING!