Hello to all

[Stephen Abela]

Hi to All, I am Stephen Abela from Malta. I'm no expert in 3D printing but use it a lot to build devices for persons with disability. 

[Demosth]

Welcome to the community, looking forward to seeing your builds progress!

Do you have examples of items you have printed for disabilities, this is a super fun area of 3d printing and is really interesting to learn more about.

[Stephen Abela]

Hi, this is the latest prototype I am working on, its a stair climbing wheelchair with many functions intended to help the user interact with the world around with very little external assistance. it has a lot of components extremally tricky to print and is almost entirely printed out of ASA. I am currently building a large Vcore3 for this project as an industrial 3d printer is still out of the reach of my budget.

wheels4Allno printing-Model.pdf

[Demosth]

Whoa! Thats a mammoth sized print! What are the physical dimensions of this?

This is a massive project.

(included the image inline for others to easily see)

[Stephen Abela]

Hi this is a proof of concept 1/2 scale. the wheels are 200mm diameter to give you an idea. I have printed this using 1mm nozzles and

still took more than a month printing. Still fixing some minor design issues before starting working on the electronic control system and testing

[Demosth]

Thats amazing, I am really interested in seeing how this progresses. Thank you for sharing and please keep us updated!

[Simon2.4]

Whoa, that's cool! What printer do you use for those big parts?

[Stephen Abela]

Hi

Most of the prints where done on two Anycubic Chiron machines fitted with volcano hotends with titanium heat breaks (as the stock hotends degraded too fast at 260deg). the largest prints where done on a stock Wanhao D9. I also printed small components on FLsun SR and an Unltimaker 2++. As you can immagine getting these machines to work properly with ASA was quite a steep learning curve with the exception of the super racer which performed wonders from the 2nd print onwards.

[Stephen Abela]

Hi,

I thought that you might be interested to see this,

This is a 0,4 scaled printed first prototype. This will be used to "debug" the hardware and test the control system safely at home in my "free time".

its entirely printed in ASA as all my trials to print the tyers in Filatough failed due to poor adhesion to any surface / ague I tried so far. Now I will try to raise some funds to build a bigger printer in a heated room to upscale to life size.

re

[claudermilk]

That's amazing. I love seeing a practical application of FDM printer prototyping.

[Demosth]

Fantastic, 

Thank you for sharing!