printable T profile belt with soft PLA

thingiverse

Soft pla is a very good material to print. After the first experiments with the feed and flow rate on my mendel reprap, I found a working profile. Slow but strong. Just for fun I tried to make a copy of a part of the belt around my x-axis. Because the soft pla has the same color - light grey - I had this idea. OpenSCAD again proofed to be very good for things like that. I made a singe pattern of one tooth and the following gap and copied it 20 times. The comparison to the original belt was stunning. The next step was printing an endless belt. The design with openSCAD was a bit tricky, but I never stop learing commands. For this I had to tweak the skeinforge profile a little, but the result was worth tuning: The belt is fitting. I tested it with some mendel parts screwed together and fixed on my desk. The endless belt is around 380 mm - quite ok and not the maximum at all. It is very though, but not tought enough - you can break it with brute force. But the elasticity is ok. It stretches about 2 mm (~0.5%) until it breaks. Not comparable to the belts used in the reprap machines but more resistant than ever expected. More about this and where to get this soft PLA on: www.ifeelbeta.de Greetings BonsaiBrain Instructions Print it with soft PLA, turn around, fix to some gears and have fun!