Portal Gun Assembly WIP 03

So the first half of the rear shell for the Portal Gun was printed as a single piece and used raft support to hold up the mass of it while the center line was flat on the platform.

It took over 26 hours to print, had a HUGE amount of wasted material for the support, and broke my makerbot.

<-- this piece.

Yup. It broke it. It was just too much wear and tear and the print nozzle got clogged, and one of the metal rods and support rubber things, came out of place.

After my husband spent an evening repairing the damage, we decided we needed to avoid anymore day-long prints.

However, we still needed to print the other half of the shell. It's the LAST frick'n piece to the gun!

So the solution I settled on was to split the shell in half so that the new slice down the middle could be the flat side that sits on the print platform.

This way it was exturding straight up the whole piece and didn't need ANY raft support at all.

No wasted material - much cleaner lines for the print, and it only took about 4-5 hours for each piece.

The downside, of course, is the fact that we would have to come up with some way to put the two sides together smoothly.

Thus - BONDO!
I'd never actually used it before, but it was recommended and so I gave it a shot.

HolycrapIlovethisstuff!

Seriously, Bondo is amazing. Love it.

My husband isn't so fond of the fumes, though. lol.

It's so smooth and it sands so nicely. Great stuff.
going to get some primer and paint this weekend.

In the 2nd pic above, I circled one of the areas I expected would give me the most trouble (and it did). Basically the flat sides where those two halves come together, are the sides that were on the print platform.

ABS plastic shrinks as it cools, so the stuff on the bottom layer sometimes has a tendency to 'curl' up off the platform as the bottom layer shrinks faster than the rest of it. These edges curled a bit and were no longer flat and flush against each other.

But the bondo filled it wonderfully. Yay.