Nuts and Volts - December 2015

50 December 2015

PRACTICAL 3D PRINTING n BY CHUCK HELLEBUYCK

he Fabrikator Mini is an open source miniature 3D printer that does a fantastic job of creating 3D printed objects. It’s small enough to fit on just about any bench, but large enough to print many useful gadgets.

The Fabrikator Mini is small enough to fit in a carrying case and travel with you if you need 3D printing on the road. Parker Leung originally designed it as the Tiny Boy 3D printer, intended as an easy to assemble kit for students to get introduced to 3D printing. Because the design is open source even for commercial sales, the Fabrikator Mini became an easy to get, fully assembled version of the Tiny Boy we can all get our hands on.

The Tiny Boy has a rather small build area when compared to current 3D printers, but is on par with the original Makerbot Cupcake and Thing-o-matic 3D printers that helped launch the home 3D printer revolution. At 80 mm x 80 mm x 80 mm for the build area, you might wonder how useful it could be. Many prints will fit in that area, and lots of designs can be easily broken into sections that can be printed on the Fabrikator Mini and then glued/ attached together.

The price is very attractive at under $220. That’s a bargain for a fully assembled 3D printer ready to use out of the box. As mentioned, it relies on open source software such as Repetier and can print at a 0.1 mm to 0.4 mm layer height, though

0.2 mm is the most reliable fine print resolution.

To get the best prints out of it, it’s recommended in the setup manual to run the print head at 11 mm/second. This is rather slow, but produces outstanding print quality. It’s also designed to print with PLA plastic, so a heated bed is not included. That didn’t stop me, however.

I added some Buildtak material to the build area — which helps with making prints stick — and printed with ABS. I had great results using a raft as the first layer. A raft is just a layer of plastic put down first to make everything stick better to the unheated bed. This is the way the

I’ve shown you many tools that you can 3D print for your workshop if you have a 3D printer, but what if you don’t have one? Well, I’m going to show you the tool you should get that will fit right next to your soldering iron: the Fabrikator Mini.