Printing Small Gears - Wierd Tapering Issue

[geert_2 557]

And what about bying standard gears with the correct teeth and diameters, although too wide, and grinding them down? Before we had 3D-printers, a lot of prototyping was done by making a mould, casting composites, and then with a Dremel tool or similar manually post-processing them. Seems like that might work here too?

 

[peteGSX 1]

Yeah that certainly would work.

 

My backup plan if I can't get this to work is to narrow the existing gears, but my hope was not to do that so I could always revert back to standard gauge if I needed to.

 

I don't have a photo but I printed all the gears and axle hubs again last night with the 0.4mm nozzle with 0.12mm layer height, a faster speed of 50mm/s, and again the lower 50 degree bed temperature.

 

I'm very surprised at the results! I don't see any obvious deformation of the teeth on either the top or bottom which is a fantastic result.

 

They need a bit of post-processing with a knife as I got a reasonable amount of stringing, but that could also simply be because I stayed with the default 50mm/s speed rather than slowing it down.

 

I'll have a closer look when I get some time tonight, but it looks far more promising than any of the 0.2mm nozzle prints which is very interesting.

[GregValiant 1,246]

I worked on my N gauge layout for 25 years and never really finished it.  I'm actually proud of that since it was a good hobby for a long time.  I can see where a 3D printer would have been a nice addition to the tool box.

 

Nothing digital here and a block system rather than radio control.  I must admit that sometimes I'd get a bit confused and the result was often a Gomez Addams moment.  There was no room for it when we moved to Florida.  I just about gave it away.

 

[peteGSX 1]

Wow looks like a lot of effort went into that! I'm just starting out at the moment and have only got a very basic layout on my bench just to get DCC sorted and to test my narrow gauge conversion efforts. I'm also designing some narrow gauge stuff based on what we run locally here in my home town of Brisbane in Australia.

 

Here's a couple of happy snaps of the prints with the 0.4mm nozzle. As you can see, not perfect, but no deformation top to bottom that I can see, but a bit too much stringing.

 

I'll attempt to clean these up over the weekend and see how they look for functionality.

 

Oh, and I moved to the square hole for the axle hub on the driven gears as suggested by Geert as I thought that was a great idea.

 

Edit: Actually, a little deformation on closer inspection, but certainly much better than any previous efforts.

 

Edited November 11, 2021 by peteGSX