Introductions - Jonathan Keep

Jonathan's post (Read An Englishman in Antwerp bellow first):

I am an artist potter based in Suffolk, England and for some time have been interested in studio based 3d ceramic printing so to find out earlier this year what Unfold have been doing was a revelation. Eager to replicate their system I visited Claire and Dries and now have my own RapMan oozing porcelain paste in my UK studio. With a desire to continue Unfolds generosity in sharing knowledge I plan to post my printing progress on the Unfold-fab blog to keep all the information in one place on the web.

My RapMan supplied by Bits from Bytes, Somerset UK is version 3.1.0 loaded with software 4.0.2. Building the flat pack went ok and I had it moving in three or four days. Not interested in printing plastic I have not put the print head together. Wanting to concentrate on printing clay I got on with putting that together.  My ceramic printing head is very cobbled together with bits of gas kiln equipment as I am well aware that there are still lots of development work to be done and so I just wanted to get started to develop from experience.

My starting point is, as developed by Unfold, a 50/60 cc plastic syringe held in a self made cradle attached to the RapMan printer head mount. The syringe is then pressurised from an air compressor -  that I fortunately already had as I have a spray gun for glazing. The one thing I had to go shopping for was the 1K Ohm resistor that bridges two points of the unused print head cable connector plug on the printer control board. This gets RapMan software to think a pen tool is fitted.

Differences from Unfold –

• I am using a manual switch at the printer head for air pressure control rather than an electronic solenoid valve. This is for simplicity and so far has worked well as I can stop and start clay ooze as I want.
• I am using a 1.5 nozzle size as my prints are single walled. My thinking is to duplicate conventional pottery coil building techniques. I have set the Z (vertical axis) increment to 1 mm. So a syringe takes about 20 minutes to empty/print and a tall form can be about 10 cm.
•  I am printing onto pre prepared wades of clay so do not print a base. This does mean I need to get into the gcode in text editor and cut out some code.
• I use a (not very good) hairdryer as I print to stiffen up the form as more clay gets layer on. 

It has been a week since I got clay oozing and the learning curve has been steep but things are happening and the development put in by Unfold has been invaluable. In which direction all this might go I do not know as ideas and possibilities keep coming but I am making pots. There are still lots of problems, with gcode, with how RapMan behaves, with the limitations of the syringe size but I have a tool I understand and can customise to my ends and that I feel has fantastic creative potential. 

There have been post on how to fill a syringe; well I have to add to that. Having a wall mounted clay extruder in my studio I made a simple turn and lock fitment to take the syringe on the base plate. I fill a plastic bag with the clay paste (my mix is 1 water to 2.5 porcelain clay powder) and stuff the bag into the rather rusty extruder. Put in the plunger and extrusion arm and pull down. Result filled syringe, and so easy to attach the next syringe for a fill.

For further information on Jonathan’s work see – www.keep-art.co.uk

Thanks for sharing Jonathan!

An englishman in Antwerp

Early last summer we got a friendly email from Jonathan Keep, a British potter who was very enthusiastic about what we achieved with 3d ceramic printing. His email kind of popped out between all the other emails of various people who are interested because Jonathan had been playing around for some time with the same idea of a robotized coiling machine based on a Reprap. Unfortunately he did not find time/budget to pursue the project at that time. Luckily for us ;-)
This was before Bits from Bytes started lowering the barrier by offering an easier (than starting from scratch with Reprap) platform to bootstrap this kind of experiments from. Without an XYZ robot to toy with, Jonathan managed to do some 'analog 3d printing' using a hand operated syringe and the results that he attached to his first email where fascinating and impressive to see:

His email ended with the plan to apply for a grant that included buying a BfB machine and doing a field trip to Unfold's office in Antwerp....

Fast forward: Jonathan came to Antwerp with his wife last october and we had a great afternoon (with tea mind you), it was great to exchange ideas. Here you see him using the virtual pottery wheel from L'Artisan Électronique like only a real potter can.

And a great snapshot of Unfold/Keep work:

Jonathan finished his Rapman last week and crafted the first objects with it. He will be posting to the Unfold ˜fab blog too and we are looking forward to what he will produce and post. We already feel the urge to finish the next claystruder prototype of which many bits 'n pieces are laying around in our studio because of the healthy 'competition' Jonathan put forward :-) 

The first post will be copy paste below until we can find how to add contributors. We also want to put a bit more effort in the Unfold ˜fab blog and post a bit more frequently from now on.

3d printed ceramics and video on show at Digital Solid expo

3d printed ceramics and video on show at Digital Solid expo at the Galerie de l'Ecole Supérieur des Beaux-Arts in Valenciennes, France.

info in french:

L'exposition  » Digital Solid / Design numérique » présente les travaux de plusieurs designers et de plusieurs ateliers numériques académiques ; François Brument, Ammar Eloueini, Mr Mann, UnFold/Claire Warnier et Dries Verbruggen, Studio lo, Innovathèque, François Clochiatti, Digital Knowledge/Studio de Projet de Master 2/ Ecole nationale supérieure d'architecture de Paris – Malaquais, l'ISD Institut supérieur de design et le Laboratoire numérique de l'Ecole supérieure des beaux-arts de Valenciennes. L'exposition comporte un volet pédagogique et didactique sur le prototypage rapide réalisé en partenariat avec Innovathèque du FCBA. Elle s'inscrit également dans le programme semestriel du Laboratoire numérique de Valenciennes et de l'Atelier numérique de l'Ecole supérieure d'art et de design de Saint-Etienne.
Ce projet ambitionne d'initier un réseau de compétence permettant la conception et la réalisation à distance de projets de design, la mise en place d'une plate-forme de recherche.

Certaines hypothèses seront expérimentées dans le cadre du projet « L'appartement, une métaphore du monde » au centre d'art Lab-Labanque, à l'occasion de l'évènement culturelBéthune 2011, Capitale Régionale de la Culture.

Lieu :
Galerie de l'Ecole supérieure des beaux-arts de Valenciennes
132 avenue du Faubourg de Cambrai
59300 Valenciennes

Infos :
http://ecoledesbeauxarts.valenciennes.fr

‘Yes, we’re open.’

UDATE: The full setup of L'Artisan Electronique will be only on display at the opening and the weekend of october 14-16


Friday October 14, 9.30u-15 u
Saturday October 15, 9.30 u – 15 u
Sunday October 16, 14 u – 18 u.

For those who are in the neigbourhood, tonight is the opening of ‘Yes, we’re open.’ An exhibition curated by our long time friend Thomas Lommée from Intrastructures who you might now for his open-standards-for-things project OpenStuctures. We will be showing a new compact version of L'Artisan Electronique (v1.5) which we have been developing along side an improved clay print head and new virtual throwing wheel software (not included yet, those will premier in at Abu Dhabi Art beginning of november).

‘Yes, we’re open.’ is an exhibition on how our networked society is reshaping the way we create, produce and consume.  You can download a great Exhibition overview + open design manual done by Thomas at http://www.intrastructures.net/yes_we_re_open.pdf

EXHIBITION
8 october - 25 october, 10h - 21h
Budascoop, Kapucijnenstraat 10, 8500 Kortrijk

OPENING
8 october, 18u30 - 22u30

Please be welcome!

-
The exhibition ‘Yes! we’re open.’ is part of the Innovation Festival Kortrijk.
www.innovationfestival-kortrijk.be

missing photo's

Ok, learned a hard lesson. Was cleaning up and splitting my iPhoto library into separate libraries. Noticed only later that everything that I had deleted in one gallery was also removed from MobileMe. Will fix the broken links coming days.

EDIT: fixed

Filling a syringe

Second post today, I'm catching up while sitting next to a humming Rapman printing a batch of ceramics. Unfortunatly I need to keep an eye on the flowrate and correct pressure or printhead speed every few minutes. More on that in another post. Luckily the Rapman has manual controls. turns head-adjusts speed-back to typing. Yesterday I was going through the excellent documentation of the frostruder at Makerbot. All goodies that where not available when I started, frostforge.py looks very usefull for adapting to Rapman. turns head-does not adjust speed-back to typing. On the Frostruder usage page in the wiki I found the following photo's of Zach filling a syringe:

I used this method exactly once :) Its totally unusably for getting a syringe filled with clay and trying to avoid any trapped air. So here's the method we hacked together in a few minutes.

The Syringe Transfer Tool!

The STT is a syringe from which the front is cut of and that is used to suck up material.

You still need a canister or lump of air free material but thats easier than to try and get the material compacted in every syringe individually. turns head-does not adjust speed-back to typing. 

Next step is to fully insert the plunger in the syringe and suck up material. The trick is to pull the plunger while simultaneously pushing the syringe in the material. After 100 times you can do it one handed while taking a picture :)

Now you detach the plastic plunger stick from the silicone plunger cap without letting air in (tricky part). After that you smooth the clay and taper it a bit, I always put little pit in the top to make sure air escapes before the clay reaches the nozzle when transferring the clay in the print syringe.

Onto the magic transfer move.... You make a nice stack of pssst-turns head-perfect print finished. A nice stack of plunger stick - STT - empty syringe and you push the clay out of the STT into the empty syringe, et voila! 

Clay recipe

I get the question often "is this special clay?". I always said that it was fairly standard but since I have been diving deeper into clay it looks more and more like there's a whole other universe in that slurry. Its not pottery, its higher chemistry and I wish I stayed a bit longer in ceramics class :)

At first we tried watering down modeling clay and this works but its hard to get consistent results. Now we always start from clay powder that you can find in the better ceramics supply store. I found out lately by buying a different type of clay that I had been lucky with the first clay that I bought because the last one had a really tough time NOT to collapse during print. The difference? Fat or lean clay, the one I always use is semi-fat (or semi lean, depends on your ideologies) and the one that collapses is lean. I can't find a good explanation in english online but fat clay particles are more plates and have a better cohesion. (if anyone has the explanation somewhere in english?)

So you'll want semi-fat or fat clay for 3d printing with extrusion. Next you need to balance the viscosity so that it extrudes around 4-5 bar (60-70 psi) but has enough strength to support itself as a build object. A water : powder ratio of 1 : 2.2 gives the best results for the clay powder we use here, this may vary for the powder clay you buy in the store but this might be a good starting point.

You could also reinforce your clay with cellulose fibers (paperclay). I have only done a quick test to see if it extrudes but did not build an object with it. I can imagine that it clogs faster.

Next post: how to fill a syringe.