I know this blog has been a lot of 3D printing lately, and even with that fairly sparse on the updates. There are a number of reasons for that, I went through a period where I just wasn’t in the mood for it and I recently made a significant job change (now I’m an independent software consultant) and just been really busy. To top everything off the transmission went out in my truck just as I was ending my last job (and it’s still waiting for funding to get fixed).
So I haven’t had much time for “hobby” stuff but here are some things I’ve done in the last month or two collected together. A while back I started building a second 3D printer myself going off the Prusa i3 design. My Anet A8 is actually a clone of the Prusa i3, in fact a lot of 3D printers are based on the Prusa design in large part because it’s an open source design. To the non-technical readers of my blog that means the plans are all openly available for use.
As I said functionally it’s basically the same as my Anet A8, just using better materials. This has been a long running project because I’ve been sourcing parts from overseas, mostly China, to keep the costs down and that can take forever to arrive. All the blue parts I printed on my Anet A8, and in fact to this day on the original Prusa (which you can buy assembled or as a kit, it’s a very highly recommended printer) the plastic parts are all printed and being open source I was able to get the exact model files to print them myself. Pretty cool if you ask me.
With my new job I’m doing a lot more remote work and that involves online meetings so I picked up a nice web cam and decided to test it out printing a miniature vase model which turned out pretty cool… shame the camera itself didn’t work out reliably for meetings and is on it’s way back right now. What’s interesting in this method is that the bottom layers are printed normally and then the rest is printed a single perimeter thick constantly increasing in the Z-axis height. This is using a much larger than normal nozzle at 0.8mm, normally I run a 0.4mm and for detail stuff as small as 0.2mm and the bigger nozzle means the single perimeter is thicker and less likely to have holes in it.
Finally something kinda sorta train related. When I installed the strip lighting on my shelf layout the adhesive backing basically didn’t work reliably and it the whole thing ended up being held up by masking tape. Well I finally designed a simple clip that will hold it in place. This is the first successful print, got a bunch more to print but at least i can say I did something for the layout right?
Matt's Railroad Blog 
Hi Matt, I had the same problem with the LED strips. To resolve it, I painted a layer of contact cement where the strips were supposed to go. Then, I stuck them to that. So far (three years), they’ve been solid. Cheers, Rene’