Freeside Atlanta

     Have you ever needed to cut a circle? Turns out you can't just freehand that. If you want to cut a circle you need a.... Circle Jig! This handy little thing straps onto a standard router. You stick a pin in one of the little holes for the center, strap a router to the other side and route yourself a circle. Here's a commercial circle jig. Seems simple enough. Now what if you want this thing -Right Now-? Well then you better have a Laser Cutter and some Acrylic. Step 1 of the design comes from measuring out the dimensions of the existing router plate. What are those curved holes for? Who knows? But they look cool right? Starting from a base circle of diameter 1/4 in (size of the router bit) we offset another circle at some whole number of mm to mark the smallest radius we can cut. Then we offset a whole bunch of other circles in 2mm increments. Then add some horizontal lines. We want to place the center holes at intersections of the horizon...

As the cold weather season arrives in Atlanta, with it comes issues with our 3D printers. Specifically problems with temperatures and print stability. Freeside is essentially a big warehouse, and our 3D printing station is setup in the large open area in the front of the space. What this means is that when it is cold in the space, this will affect the printing quality because the ambient temperature is far lower than what is optimal for thermoplastics. The cold ambient air will cause parts to rapidly cool during the middle of a print. And with materials like ABS which can shrink dramatically during cooling, this causes prints to warp, deform, and delaminate during and after printing is finished. The print on the left is showing signs of delamination from plastic cooling mid print. To remedy this, we built an acrylic enclosure for our LulzBot AO-100, which is our dedicated ABS printer. We tested the proof of concept of whether an enclosure would help mitigate printing problem...