Adrian Bowyer has written a set of hints and tips here and I needed to use every single one of them. I don't know how anybody can use ArtOfIllusion without his guide.
The reason it is difficult is that you have to build up complex 3D shapes by composing primitive shapes like blocks and cylinders with boolean operations like union, intersection and subtract. That is fine but you are not allowed to do boolean ops between objects that have coincident or tangential faces. If you do, then you create non manifold objects which cannot be converted to STL files. However, you generally do want join things with a common faces. Here is the object I designed :-
It is a cradle to support the heatsink of my high temperature extruder design. If you take one of the upright legs as an example you see it's a cylinder that meets a rectangular lug with a common face at the bottom and tangential joints at the sides. It also meets the cone on the top with a common face. All of these are not allowed: I had to make the cylinder slightly too long and slightly bigger in diameter before unioning it with the cone and the block. That left it protruding slightly at the bottom, which is solved by subtracting a large flat rectangle from the base.
Another problem is that if you have long strings of boolean operations the application becomes very slow doing anything. That is solved by converting the results of boolean operations into triangle meshes. It solves the speed issue but then for some reason boolean operations on the resulting triangle mesh only offer intersection and subtraction. To restore the possibility of union you have to optimise the triangle mesh in the solid editor. Not hard, but not intuitive and very time consuming.
I tried to make the object in HDPE with my lash up stainless steel extruder but it was not reliable enough. This was the first attempt which stopped short due the filament slipping in the pump: -
I also realised at this point that two of the columns were too close to the heatsink. Other attempts resulted in either the filament slipping, or the GM3 clutch breaking free. I had stuck it with super glue, but that does not hold very well, so in the end I welded it with my soldering iron.
It takes an enormous amount of force to extrude with the stainless steel barrel and I am beginning to think the idea may be fatally flawed. I think that because there is a slow temperature gradient down the barrel you have a point where the filament is only just molten so it is very viscous, so is hard to push past that point. With the PTFE barrel the temperature will fall away quicker and the walls are also much more slippery.
I will try again with a much shorter barrel, but to get the object made, I put my old extruder back together and made it in ABS: -
As you can see lots of stringing due to extruder overrun, but easily cleaned up with a penknife and drill. It is much easier to remove strings from ABS and HDPE objects than it is from PCL.
I think the dark lines on the posts are grease from the extruder bearings.
All in all I think it worked very well: this is my first ABS object, other than test blocks, and it is also the largest and most complex object I have made so far. It is a bit warped underneath because I didn't use a raft and it is 100% filled. As it happens the underside does not matter at all for this part. It took just over 2 hours so I went for a walk and left it to it.
I designed the shape for HDPE, the objectives are for it to hold the heatsink rigidly and not restrict the airflow too much. Had I designed it for ABS I would have made it a bit less chunky.
Here it is with the heatsink installed: -
Next I need to make a new extruder support bracket / clamp to mate with this part to continue my attempt to make the high temperature extruder.
