3D Printing

Ever since I was first exposed to 3d printing in high school I have been fascinated by its ability to rapidly produce functional prototypes. While 3D printing might not be as fast as laser cutting it allows you to produce much more complicated parts. Since high school I have purchased both an LCD and FDM printers to help with my various functional and non-functional projects such as jigs, miniatures and one of my more recent projects, a rivet gun spacer prototype that allowed for riveting inside a counterbore. My FDM printer is an open source Creality Ender 3 v2, over the years I have done various upgrades to it including: adding a mesh bed levelling sensor, replacing the main board, switching from Bowden to direct drive extruder, replaced the direct drive extruder with a newer direct drive and I'm currently using a Slice Engineering hot end with a PT1000 to hopefully reach 350°. The last upgrade should allow my ender to print ultra high performance materials such as PEKK and PEEK along with fibre additive variants. However, these will be the last upgrades I do to my Ender 3 before beginning my summer project, to scratch build a 3D printer.