MakerLab Hosts Physics Department Class

The Illinois MakerLab was proud to host Professor George Gollin and his design class, Physics 398DLP, at the lab recently! Their plan was to print PLA cases for the environmental data loggers that the students are building.

Professor Gollin has a lot of experience with 3D Printing and was even able to give us some tips to make sure prints run smoothly. He stated that four factors must be considered to ensure a perfect print. First, the glass build plates must be scrupulously clean. Second, the print job must run with the correct build plate temperature for the particular color of filament loaded into the printer. Third, the print job must also use a proper nozzle temperature, which varies from spool to spool of filament. Lastly, the clean build plate must be swabbed with 70/30 isopropanol/water immediately before printing.

So, Physics 398DLP arrived with cleaning supplies, 70/30 alcohol, cardboard plates to seal the open fronts of the printers and adhesion test print jobs that were run before the main print job in order to find the best temperatures for each machine’s build plate and nozzle. They began by cleaning all the build plates with dishwashing detergent and hot water in a sink elsewhere in BIF. By running the test print jobs, they established optimum temperatures (which varied from machine to machine), reapplied alcohol, then ran the main print jobs. Check out the final results! Eleven out of the twelve prints were flawless!