For those wondering where the scale factor came from of “About 1.4” or more precisely 1.4142, all you do is remember what you learned in trig, draw a right angle triangle with an angle of 45 degrees, set the hypotenuse to one, and to find the opposite angle use the cosine function (though at a 45 degree angle both sine and cosine are the same value) and which means when the printer moves 1 along the hypotenuse, it only moves 0.7071, so put that over 1 to get the scale factor of 1.4142. Or you can remember the 1/1/root 2 45 degree triangle that shows up everywhere, and realize if you want it to move 1 in the “Z”, then it needs to move root 2 in the hypotenuse, which is also 1.4142. Either way, the math is not that hard.
However, in proving the concept that this printer could work, I made a number of concessions. For instance, while the movement was corrected for, I didn’t correct for the flow rate, and the prints were all over extruding. I sliced the models chunky, 0.28mm layers, but because of the squish of the hypotenuse, they were actually printing at 0.2mm layers, but still extruding for a 0.28mm layer. I should have decreased the flow rate to 70.7% to correct for this. But this wasn’t me working on a long term solution… yet.
All this math stuff I edited out of the video because it kills analytics, but I find it fascinating.
As I sit here writing this blog post, I’m feeling stuck. I have to come up with something to say about this video, but since making this video I have moved on to playing with resin printing, Electroblocks, testing different slicers, and working on the next 3d printer for review. In fact I have 2 machines I’m testing right now, one of which was DOA, so it’s sitting around taking up space while I wait for a replacement motherboard. I have opinions about this, but that’s a topic for a different time.
The point is, I tried something different with this video. I didn’t edit it right away. Instead I made a different video quickly, released a few more, and in the end it took me 2 weeks to get around to editing this video, and now that I have, I’ve kinda forgot what I was thinking about when I made it. So, not a lot of Behind the scenes info this week.