About me

I've been tuning my MakerFarm 3D printer for about a year, including upgrading it with a temperature-controlled heated build chamber. Print quality seems to be very high now (at least within the category of consumer-grade printers) with very even layering. I got into 3d printing for prototyping my own projects, so I take quality seriously. Since things are working so smoothly now with my 3d printer, I decided to make an account on makexyz and farm out some of the excess capacity.

Be aware that when STL files are converted to the "gcode" that is run on the 3d printer, there are some parameters that can be set. If you don't supply these, some reasonable defaults will be used.

3D Printing Parameters:

- Perimeters: number of boundary layers horizontally between the outside of the object and the "interior", this volume is always 100% filled with plastic. Default 3.
- Infill ratio: Percent volume that is filled with plastic in the interior of the object. Default 25%.
- Upper/lower solid layers: Number of boundary layers vertically. this is like perimeters but for the vertical direction. Default 3.

Increasing the above parameters results in higher quality prints, but could bump up the cost somewhat as the material cost and printing time naturally increases.

Also, let me know if the object you are printing needs to work as a container for water or other liquids. I have successfully printed such containers but the settings need adjustments for this to work. With the default settings, there may be micro gaps that will slowly leak.

As to colors, anything other than blue will incur an additional fee to cover changing the filament twice (once to your color, and once back to the default blue which incurs no extra fee). Also, if I don't have the color in stock, it may add 3-4 days lead time to the project.

About the CNC service, I have only a narrow range of workholding, tooling, and stock material available, and I am not interested in expanding that range. What I can do is mill out cores and cavities for simple molds out of 1in thick 7075-T6 aluminum stock, conforming to: 6in x 4in overall mold size, 1/4in max "stickout" of the core above the clamp, and no pockets that can't be reached with ordinary tooling. The listed CNC price per hour is for actual milling only. It is to be expected that some CAD/CAM work may be needed to get your project to the milling phase, how much this will cost really depends on the complexity of the job and what shape your files are in currently.