New Forest Observatory ®

At around 11:35 a.m. this wet and dreary Monday morning I kicked off a really BIG 3D print of a Mandelbulb. The first print > 200mm on the new ELEGOO Neptune 4 plus super 3D printer.

To produce the GCODE for my big 3D models I run ELEGOO’s ORCA slicer on my super-duper Ryzen main machine (which runs Windows 11). My old slicer gave up on these really big models and I was worried that even the newer software might not cope. I recall that my old slicer gave up when GCODE’s got much above 200Mb, but my new system has produced successful GCODEs for these big mathematical prints up to 3.21Gb!!!! I think this should be enough to do much of what I want.

The top image shows the beginnings of the first base layer going down (the bed is 320mm x 320mm). The 275mm diameter Mandelbulb I am printing will take 5 days 1 hour and 29 minutes to print and will use 2.45kg of filament. I have a 3kg spool of ELEGOO filament loaded so hopefully that will see the job through. Several unknowns for me in going for such a huge and heavy print. Will a bed-slinger with over 2kg of filament on the baseplate manage to keep the 0.2mm resolution right through to the end of the print? Providing there are no glitches we should see the answer to that in 5 day’s time.

These are really exciting times for me as for the first time I am able to push the software and hardware to the limits for my setup. 

Also in the pipeline is a 275mm (on a side) 4th order Menger Sponge. This will take 12 days 12 hours and 53 minutes to print and will use 4.85kg of filament!! Fortunately ELEGOO supply filament spools up to 5kg in capacity, and that’s why the Sponge is only 275mm across and not 300mm which the bed could accommodate. I think the bigger sponge would have taken around 10kg of filament and I really didn’t fancy trying to splice a 5kg spool of filament to the end of the previous 5kg spool of filament half way through a print. Yes, chicken.

Come back here on Friday to see if the print was a success – or a failure.

Came into the study this morning to find a finished Sierpinski pyramid courtesy of the ELEGOO Neptune 4 plus. Superb quality print and I am amazed at this printer’s capabilities.

Just 12 hours to go on this 86-hour print. Keep everything crossed that it continues smoothly to the end.

I recently purchased the ELEGOO Neptune 4 Plus 3D printer in a Black Friday deal at a ridiculously low price. I have been wanting a larger print-volume printer for quite a long while now, and as the Neptune 4 plus offers a 320mm x 320mm print bed with a 385mm print height, then this was the printer for me!

Assembly, bed-levelling and first test print were carried out in just a few hours and it was very straightforward indeed. I have seen it mentioned that the Neptune 4 Plus is not a beginner’s printer. I completely disagree, and it was a way easier introduction to 3D printing than my first (build it yourself) printer which was an ANET A6.

My first (test) print was the flower pot that came on the USB stick that came with the printer. It printed out perfectly, first time, with no tweaking necessary. I was amazed.

Not being one to hang about I went straight into printing a Sierpinski pyramid, 200mm on a side, and a 4-day print, as a test “ordeal by fire” of the new printer. I started printing on Friday afternoon and it is now Sunday afternoon, so 2 days of printing so far, with 2 more days to go. Why is the pyramid only 200mm on the base when the baseplate is 320mm across? Because I didn’t have enough filament on the reel to go for the full size print. You can see the progress so far in the image at top.

I knew (of course) that large volume models were going to need a lot of filament, but I wasn’t sure quite how much until I started slicing them. A 4th order Menger Sponge at 0.2mm resolution and measuring 295mm on a side will require just under 5kg of filament, that’s a lot of filament (push ups for those in the know). Fortunately ELEGOO also produces 3kg and 5kg rolls of PLA filament, so I can source enough filament, on a single roll, for these projects, but there is going to be a big unknown here as to whether the printer can cope. 5kg of mass is a HUGE amount for a bedslinger to chuck around!! Will it even cope? And if it does cope, will the resolution go to pot?? We’ll soon see when I get the next project underway I guess. Fingers crossed everybody.

Just came back from the dog walk tonight and took a look at the pinhole camera on the side of the house before going in. I don’t believe this!! Once again a bird has decided to peck through the Aluminium foil with the pinhole in it. Extremely annoying, and absolutely no idea why this has happened twice in a row now when it has never happened before. O.K. so I have to replace the Aluminium foil with a piece of drinks can with a pinhole in it, but why after all these years are birds suddenly taking an interest in the pinhole camera?