Then I clamped them as shown above, with the pin tip just sticking through the nozzle hole. I covered them very lightly with silicone grease. I put a short length of wire insulation on a sewing pin to increase its diameter, with the pin tip sticking out by about 1 mm. Make the tube hole so that the tube is a tight fit. This acts as a punch, driving a clean-cut 3mm disc of plastic down into the wood. I found that the easiest way to make clean holes was to put the disk on a flat piece of wood then tap a short 3mm steel rod with a sharp-edged flat end against it with a hammer. You need two holes in the plastic disc: an offset one to let the ink feed tube through, and one roughly in the middle for the nozzle. Using gold plated phosphor bronze connector terminals (some contacts are folded over and can be carefully unrolled to achieve a nice spring) and with suitable locations already printed into the housing may be the fastest way and allow for multiple contacts and easy exchange of the disk for testing. You may be able to use other low temperature alloys that have a higher concentration of alloy elements besides lead and the method used by many companies is to use a spring loaded contact (often with multiple points). For best results you need to have a high silver content solder, regular solder will dissolve the silvering before your eyes as you try to get your blog of solder to adhere leaving bare ceramic that you can do nothing with. In the past commercial users have resorted to using conductive epoxy to join the wires to avoid the trouble. However soldering onto the silver film on the piezo disk is often a problem. Soldering to the brass disk is usually trouble free if it is clean and not placed on a cold surface. When connecting wires onto the piezo element you need to take more than the usual amount of care. (Note the Mouser ones are not supplied with leads - you have to solder them on yourself.) If you want to make a smaller device (you'll have to redesign the reprapped parts) then Mouser also sell a 12 mm diameter piezo disc. I used one of these YU87U buzzers from Maplins, but these (untried) from Mouser look as if they would also work. I used a syringe as my ink tank, but any small watertight container that you can connect to the silicone tube will do. You want the disc and the buzzer to be the same size. Draw round the piezo buzzer element with a fine felt-tip pen then cut carefully inside your line with scissors. The plastic disc can be cut from any reasonably stiff (but not brittle) piece of flat plastic. Sewing pin with a length of wire insulation Then I'll see if I can add heater elements so we can inkjet waxes and wood's metal.Īll the files for this are here in the RepRap repository. I need to do more work on the driver electronics. But it does work (there's a video below). It is experimental, so it's reliability is not yet perfect. It uses a piezoelectric buzzer to drive the ink. There is no machining involved in making it - the only tools needed are scissors, a scalpel or razor blade, a hammer, a short piece of 3 mm steel rod to use as a punch, and a glue gun. The other parts are standard easily-obtainable items. It was inspired by Johnrpm's Scratchbuilt_Piezo_Printhead. This is an inkjet head that is completely makable in a RepRap machine.
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