Printer Upgrades for my Creality CR-20

So I've been working away on my CR-20 3D printer to reduce the running noise. The base printer out of the box is pretty noisy and I could hear it at the other end of the house. Which means it was driving the wife crazy with her super sonic hearing of a teacher. The printer itself has been great, just the noise level was a bit much for being the same room for long periods of time.

The first and simplest upgrade was to print out some squash ball feet from thingiverse.com. Then place some old packing foam under the printer. This reduced the noise by about 4-5 decibels. Four squash balls and printing some feet cost about $20 NZ. So not a bad start.

They look something like this (just a shot from the web as example)

After that I ordered in from China three dampeners for the motors as this was the next most recommend thing to do. A couple of weeks later they arrived. It took a few days once I had them to go though and get them installed. I ended up having to bust out the Dremel and pull the printer apart to get the Y axis to work. A slip while cutting saw me jump but thanks to safety gear no loses of fingers or blood, just some paint on the metal mounting plate.

This was by far the greatest reduction in noise, even though it only dropped the actual noise level buy another 4-5 decibels, it has cut down the higher pitch frequencies which were the ones that penetrating the walls and you could hear at the other end of the house. For less than $20 NZ delivered its a no brainer.

So after a bit of fun getting the upgrades installed and the printer settings adjusted slightly,  an average of 10 decibels decrease for $40 NZ ... not bad at all and I very pleased with the results.

Now onto printing some more upgrade parts for the printer ... and a few more Manticore's and Scorpions ... you can never have too many tanks after all.

Battletech and 3D Printing

Well its been an age since I posted last. We have been playing Battletech and Hail Caesar of late and I actually finally managed to beat Mark's Romans a few weeks back with my Pyrrhic army.

On the Battletech front my push to build a full 8x4 city table top is continuing. With my recent purchase of a Creality CR-20 3D printer. I'm now well into printing buildings and learning the in's and outs for 3D printing. Which there are alot of. I've approached it as a hobby and expect to have a fare number of failures along the way. Thanks to YouTube, Facebook and internet I've managed to resolve most of my problems pretty quickly.

With all the data out there in the cloud on 3D printing it hasn't been hard to pickup and get going. I'm already at the point have having installed some upgrades on the printer, and have already got my next few upgrades lined up. The biggest challenge was to get the noise level down when it was printing. I've now got it down to around 55 decibels from 65, so simply closing the down to my office keeps the wife happy.

So far I've done a couple of buildings and a bunch of smaller tanks and vehicles.

I also created some radar maps for areospace fighters a couple of months back. Still ahvent got to use them yet in a game but looking foward to it.

Last weekend we were in Wellington and went along to the Weta Workshop with a couple of the lads and did a couple of tours there along with checking out the World War I displays at the museums. It's my second time through Weta Workshops and I was still amazed at what they create. They have even added in a few things about 3D printing since I was there last, which of course I was rather interested to see. They have some seriously awesome printers there.

We were aloud to take photos in the Thunderbird tour. In this first photo, forget about Mr Will May's and look at the background... now wouldn't that be an epic Battletech board.

I'm seriously gonna have to 3D print some of the Thunderbird ships.

 These young fellers just cant help themselves.

 The perspective modeling was awesome.

Heading back out of Wellington Airport we ran into Smaug so I had to stop for a selfie.