3D printed plastic burner experiments (photo heavy)

[Frosty]

On 5/15/2019 at 2:05 PM, Another FrankenBurner said:

It will do full animation of the hot end along it's path.  It is very handy for narrowing down print problems.  We could find a workable solution for your wall paper.

My intent was humor, I don't need different wall paper on my comp. 

Frosty The Lucky.

[Another FrankenBurner]

No worries, I knew you were kidding.  My intent was also humor.  Ba dum tss.  

[Frosty]

I figured you were but sometimes I just don't know anymore.  Seriously if you had made wallpaper and sent it to me I'd feel obligated to give it a try and  and . . . Do you know how hard it is to get paste off a computer? 

Frosty The Lucky.

[Another FrankenBurner]

Right.  You don't want to use the little scorers for obvious reasons and the power steamers are also out.  That does sounds like quite the chore.

[Frosty]

Funny that, when I graduated from my Commodore 64 I did a lot of reading and discovered RISC and it made so much more sense to me I bought a NexGen, I don't recall the numbers but it was faster than a 486 and had more ram and storage, seriously, who in the world would want more than 6,xxx k storage? It was designed as a scssi driver and I could daisy chain a couple for a MEG!!

It was FAST FAST FAST I loved it. Soooo, I pulled the case off, primed it, textured it then painted it bright red Titian I believe. Then I painted it matt black and when dry I used fine sand paper on a block and lightly sanded through the black.

I expected a matt black case with red texture however I couldn't sand through JUST the black so I ended up with a mostly black case with these really REALLY creepy off white mottled spots circled in bright red. It looked badly diseased.

Then I got a notice from NexGen that my CPU was from a defective batch and I returned the diseased looking computer to them for a full rebate. Seems Risc systems were being bought up by the large CISC based companies and I bought my 386. 

I've never painted another computer.

Frosty The Lucky.

[Another FrankenBurner]

Now you are getting to the beginning of my life.  My earliest computer memory is playing 688 attack sub on a 286 while living on Guam.

I have since played with a Timex Sinclair 1000.  Upgradable 16K RAM pack.  My favorite was the introduction in the manual, which I kept.  Some highlights:

1. You will enjoy computing.
2. You will find it easy as well as enjoyable.
3. You shouldn't be afraid of the computer.  You are smarter then it is.  So is your parakeet, for that matter.
4. You will make mistakes as you learn.  The computer will not laugh at you.
5. Your mistakes will not do any harm to the computer.  You can't break it by pushing the wrong button.
6. You are about to take a giant step into the future.  Everyone will soon be using computers for every part of their daily lives, and you will have a head start.

A computer is a tool, like a hammer or a saw - or perhaps like a food processor.  Hammers and saws generally do only one thing well.  A food processor can perform different operations, and normally you can "program" it by simply pushing the proper buttons.

In the near future, your personal computer will be able to dial and answer your telephone, monitor your burglar alarm, control appliances, water your lawn and perform many other duties for you.

[Irondragon Forge ClayWorks]

When we switched over to computers for reports, I think it was around 1990, I walked into the staff room to discover one of the old time officers had white out all over the CRT screen.

[Frosty]

In the days the CRT was green? I was messing with computers in stores, mostly game consoles and waiting for a REAL computer, something I could program to do what I wanted. The first one I touched was I THINK a Sinclair 8k and boy was that a treat! The 16 was only a couple months later, I'd held off buying because everybody seemed to be advertising computers coming out soon. 

The Commodore 32 was the Ferrari of it's day and the office was getting computers.  Like so many Gvt. supply departments they were directed to buy the lowest bid. Sooooo, there were brand new Trash 80s moved in and worse yet they were terminals not computers. The State bought a surplussed main frame and it lived on it's own floor of the gvt. main offices in Juneau. So everybody worked on a terminal that relied on analogue phone line connections to a 30 year old main frame with TAPE storage!

I got my Commodore 64 about that time and loved it, the only down side was dot matrix printers. I had a type writer I could edit without re-writing! Sure I had a periferal tape player recorder for storage at first but got a 5 1/5" floppy drive when they came out, 640k storage!!! You could buy software and Basic was intuitive and easy so I could modify software to actually do practical things. I mostly changed file size limits and taught it how to use the floppy drive for ram. Then I found a periferal floppy drive brand that'd daisy chain! I was STYLIN then! 

Then I "upgraded" to an Apple II Plus when the prices came down from ridiculous to outrageous only do discover it was a 48k with a low clock speed and zero onboard memory that'd erase the disk if you didn't close and remove it before turning the comp off. When compared the Commodore was 4x the machine for about 1/10 the retail price and is still pretty valuable in the collector market.

On 5/17/2019 at 2:22 PM, Irondragon Forge & Clay said:

to discover one of the old time officers had white out all over the CRT screen.

Oh NO, old computer jokes?! I'll stick to the clean ones. User calls customer service. "The computer isn't working,"  . . . "Is it turned on?" . . . "Yes," . . . "Did you open Windows?" . . . "No, it's winter."

Frosty The Lucky.

[671jungle]

On 5/17/2019 at 9:08 AM, Another FrankenBurner said:

while living on Guam

I am from Guam. Born and raised native. I live in Utah now. 

[D.Rotblatt]

9 hours ago, Frosty said:

Then I "upgraded" to an Apple II Plus

Just after college I ran a computer camp with apple II's.  I remember paying $60 or so to typeset a letter because the best printer on the market was a dot matrix.  Those computers where great to teach on, since they came with Basic burnt into the chips. Turn em on and program, great for teens to learn on!  We had the first mac..a 512K I think.  The OS took up so much room you couldn't do anything on it.

DanR

[Another FrankenBurner]

That is cool 671jungle.  I was a Navy brat.  It was one of my favorite places.  I lived there a few years when I was a young boy.  I wish I was older so I remembered more.  I remember only the young boy highlights.  The boonies, toads, geckos, hermit crabs, banana spiders, concrete pillboxes, Gab Gab beach, the typhoons, the food, etc.  The food.  I am made fun of regularly for my still love of spam.  My father brings up chicken kelaguen whenever Guam enters the conversation.  

[ThomasPowers]

First system: an old PDP that we access through teletype writers and our tape storage was paper tape.  Given to our high school back before 1975.

Moved from that to an IBM 370/168 (IIRC) using punched cards.

First monitor I used for access was Orange and I could read faster than the page could write to the screen; at least it wasn't an acoustically coupled modem!

Several years after college I went to work for AT&T Bell Labs----BWAhahahahahahahahahahaha; used a variety of UNIX systems and SUN systems; I still do my best work on UNIX based systems.

[pnut]

On 5/17/2019 at 2:03 AM, Frosty said:

Funny that, when I graduated from my Commodore 64 I did a lot of reading and discovered RISC and it made so much more sense to me I bought a NexGen

Does anyone remember the Amiga 1000 

23 minutes ago, ThomasPowers said:

First system: an old PDP that we access through teletype writers

In the early eighties my uncle had a Western Union location. They were using teletype machines at that point.

Load"*",8,1

[Buzzkill]

Never had the Amiga.  We had the C64 and then the 128 with both 1541 and 1571 drives.  It's amazing how things have changed.  Have you thought about how many 5.25 floppies it would take to hold information that's now on a chip the size of your smallest fingernail?

It seems like I was always typing:

Load"$",8,9

for some reason.  Maybe it was the second floppy drive.  Hard to retrieve the details of memories that old - must be stored on an old floppy disk which was stuck to the file cabinet with a magnet.

[ThomasPowers]

I remember a company I worked for rebuilding an old winchester platter drive (the "washtub" drive) as we had to prove something we had sold decades ago would survive Y2K and since the owner had never used it; or maintained it we didn't have the source code anymore.  We found a set of platters hidden underneath a raised floor in an old lab...  (No problem with Y2k; save for contractual promises to maintain computers for decades...)

[Frosty]

I'd picked up a surplus 286 when the C128 was hot then bought a 386-33. WooHOO!

What does "C: (enter)" tell you about programmers?

The death of my last 1541 and it's unavailability was what convinced me to go with IBM platforms. Apple was WAY too expensive and restrictive, still is. Just TRY cracking the case and installing a SCSSI card on an Apple motherboard. When I installed a Bernoulli disk drive I was styling.

Frosty The Lucky.

[671jungle]

On 5/19/2019 at 8:52 PM, Another FrankenBurner said:

The boonies, toads, geckos, hermit crabs, banana spiders, concrete pillboxes, Gab Gab beach, the typhoons, the food, etc.  The food.  I am made fun of regularly for my still love of spam.  My father brings up chicken kelaguen whenever Guam enters the conversation.  

this just brought me back. Yes, the food ties with the ocean for what I miss most. I have some pickled mango my grandpa batched up and sent as well as some chi'guan (salted and cured juvenile rabbit fish). IT IS AMAZING! I have not been back in 13 yrs. Unfortunately there is a drug epidemic that has been plagueing the island for the last 30ish yrs.

Those pillboxes are everywhere. I would play on and around them as a kid not understanding the history. pretty wild now that I think back.

And there is the story Yokoi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoichi_Yokoi  a Japanese soldier who hid in the jungle for 25ish yrs after the war had ended and had no idea.

Sorry took so long to reply. Life strikes again. Mental illness is a real thing.

P.S. I have not touched spam since i left. But I love it.

 

[Another FrankenBurner]

Now you are making me hungry.  I loved the red rice and coconut candy.  

I haven't been back.  It was 91 when I left.  

Utah, 5 hours away.  Small world. 

[louspinuso]

18 hours ago, Frosty said:

 then bought a 386-33. WooHOO!

I had a 386DX-20 that I overclocked to 40 Mhz.  

I still remember my first computer, the Tandy Color Computer II.  Taught me more about programming at 12 than I would learn until I hit college (and I took every computer class I could find in High School).  Now I spend my days working on networks and dreaming of having enough money to spend my days in the shop.

 

[HojPoj]

This has been an interesting stroll down memory lane and all, but when can we expect AFB's inducers to available/on sale?

[J.P. Hall]

And here I was thinking I was cool when I had a third-hand thinkpad and Ubunt 12.something. To be fair, it did give me a great appreciation for command line and unix-like utilities.

[Vincent Tai]

Until AFB gets his burners released for sale, I do want to try modelling/printing a few myself. With the burner pointing upwards do y'all think the printed ones would last a few months? Planning to put one in a NARB too; again nozzle pointing up. AFB; how did your printed prototypes fare; did they ever see extended use in a forge?

Or am I on a dead end, too much heat radiating to be safe? I can picture printed burners faring better in a NARB.

 

[Another FrankenBurner]

As to the availability, we have to figure out how to produce them reliably and also workout all the other stuff.  As soon as possible.  Life stuff has this effort slowed for a couple more weeks.  I am still conducting burner experiments regularly.  Nozzle experiments as well.

As to the running a forge with a plastic inducer, there was too much radiant heat for mine.  Pointed up helps with chimney and may induce a little more air but it wasn't enough to compete with the radiant heat.  The plastic melt point is too low.  I suspect you are right about the NARB's doing a little better with this.  

Mix tube length can get the plastic a bit further away from the forge.  The 3/4" burner has a longer mix tube then the 1/2" burners I tried it with.  A few extra inches might make a lot of difference here.  Though, the mix tubes themselves can get quite warm depending on forge design and they don't have to get very hot to make the plastic soft.

User jwmelvin is using plastic reducers with a NARB running at full temperatures.  He did have one go soft which he talks about on this post of his thread but he is still using plastic as far as I know.  His reducers have an open back(plastic free) so radiant energy may not be hitting the plastic like it does with my inducers.  He is another user to ask.  He can probably provide you with more information than I did on the subject.

 

[jwmelvin]

4 hours ago, Another FrankenBurner said:

he is still using plastic as far as I know.

Yes, I'm using my printed inducers, but haven't used them much (just haven't had time so far) and heat has been a problem. Most significantly, the few times I had the flame burn back in the mixing tube, things heated up very quickly. I haven't noticed that radiant heat is an issue but I only ran the jet nozzle a couple times and now I'm focusing more on the ribbon nozzle. I do think that will be better for heat isolation. My plenum and mixing tube assembly is quite long by others' standards. 

Plastic inducers are hardly a viable long-term solution, but they have enabled me to experiment and get to know the components a bit. I'd like to cast in aluminum like AFB, though it will be my first attempt at casting, and will have to wait until I build a melting furnace as I don't think my forge is large enough to put a crucible in. I have tried to keep my designs favorable to casting, with the eventual goal in mind. 

[D.Rotblatt]

OK, I had some spare time one evening, so was playing around on my CAD and worked up a Frankenburner.  I have a sand casting setup, so I was trying to figure out how to make one that will be easy to sand cast.  My thought was to make it in pieces that are then assembled, but as I looked at it the cleanup and assembly would probably make it not worth the trouble.  

Now I see that JWMelvin has got an open back with fins pushing the air into the spiral.  How is that working?  It's a shape that I could easily design a sand cast around.  How does the flame look with a single nozzle rather then on a ribbon burner?  I'd love to see a pic of it burning outside the forge.

My other

Dan R