Print heads for the Makery Mendel

Tonight, I was on assignment for Brandon and the Makery Mendel again, this time drilling some really really tiny holes.

These acorn nuts will be used as print heads to extrude the molten plastic on the almost-done Makery Mendel 3D printer. I started the process by holding the piece of allthread (Which has a shallow hole in the end) in the lathe chuck and threading a nut onto the end.  I know that generally a bolt thread isn’t true enough to rely on for machining, but in this case, I want the operations all true to the bolt, as that’s how it’s going to be held in use.

Next, I faced off the rounded end of the nut, being careful not to get too deep (which is what happened on the rightmost unit). I then used a tiny drill bit in the tailstock chuck to ever-so-gently drill the hole.  On the 0.3mm unit, you can see where the drill bit had a slight bend in it, and wanted to drag around the part instead of start drilling in the center.  I was able to change the orientation of the bit in the chuck to correct this.

Finally, I cut a bit of an angle on the side of the nut, making it more conical than round.  Sort of like a cut-off funnel.  Hopefully it works well. One of the nuts turned out to be plated (which, sadly, is one of the sizes I didn’t make a duplicate for)