Axe

Just used my oven to dry the brittle PVA that was fracturing earlier. Right out of the oven and warm it was much more pliable. Printed with it and heard less "popping" sounds and it did not fracture when feeding it.

Our current humidity here has been ranging from 70%-90% over the last few weeks. My printer is in an unheated room (as are all my spools). I cannot see how the PVA would be too dry so as to become brittle..... It's a mystery to me why it would so brittle as to fracture (it has done so several times over the last few meters of material), yet still "pop" when melting in the nozzle.

I use scissors or a VERY sharp knife.

I'm having the same issue and at the same time hearing "pops" when it is printing, so was leaning toward it being a water saturation issue. Yes, I know it doesn't make sense that it is more brittle, but the sound it makes when printing seems typical of moist PVA. My spool of PVA is older (3-4 months), always kept sealed in a plastic bag with desiccant, in a plastic storage box with desiccant, and only the last few meters of the spool has this brittle issue. Last print I just let the broken bits stay in the bowden tube and pushed it through with more off the same spool. Sure, I didn't get retraction, but it worked well enough for what I was printing............

I loaded the DICOM file onto a proprietary workstation and used the MRI vendor's software to export an STL file. I needed to do quite a bit of editing/segmenting to remove the skull, vessels and other soft tissue before generating the model. I may try using "Slicer" next time as I understand it has pretty decent segmenting tools and is free (so I can do it at home instead of at the MRI site). After export I loaded the model into ZBrush to do some further clean up before re-exporting from ZBrush as another STL. Fairly labour-intensive. Also used ZBrush to hollow out the model, leaving the walls just under 2mm thick.

And on its stand (stand printed in Ultimaker Pearl White PLA). The stand has a compartment for the battery pack/controller for the LED lights with a sliding cover. I think my wife might get tired of my brains spread around the house......

And here's the one I printed on my S5, full size.

Ok, here's another try.... Had to upload them to my website then link them here. This is the first one showing how I made it into a lamp. 3 different intensities depending on how "bright" my ideas are..........

I'l love to put the other GIFs here, but I keep getting error "-200" even though they are under the kb size limit. Anyone know what that means?

New to 3D printing, but not to modelling (experienced with Rhino, ZBrush, C4D, among others....). This, however was a bit of a new experiment for me. Printing my own brain from a 3D MRI dataset. Always wanted my brain on my desk..... This first one I sent to Shapeways to get printed through laser sintering. Expensive, so I only got it printed 80% of actual size (and hollow). Figured it would nice with lighting inside, and I couldn't resist putting the lightbulb over it - for when I want to signal I had a good idea! I now have a Ultimaker S5, so I printed the second one full size out of Translucent Blue PET/G. The most expensive part was filling the hollow structure with PVA. Used half a spool for that! Hope these animated GIFs attach properly - haven't posted before......