Hi folks, I was interested in 3D printing an angled/tunnel/vanilla riser for a board but I only have an ender 3 so without getting an enclosure, likely a hot end, and some serious tweaking I don’t think I’ll get near Taulman 910 or even much TPU. That combined with concerns around layer splitting, especially on the angled ones, had me wondering about silicone.
This video looks very interesting if nothing else, so I’m going to try and print some molds based off the inverse of a riser pad. I may need to think about parts shrinking especially around the critical dimensions of the mounting holes, and I’m fairly sure I’ll also need to account for compression. Not a silicone expert so I’ll do some reading, but it looks like it doesn’t suffer from permanent deformation from single impacts so I’ll see what a sustained load of the board with regular extra weight (me on top) and irregular dynamic loads (bumps, road drops) does to it.
I don’t imagine it’ll be perfect straight away (which is going to annoy me a lot because I kind of need the part quickly, if anyone has angled riser pads in the EU pls link me) but I’ll try and document the steps along the way
I found one or two threads on casting stuff before but that was mostly for wheels like this topic:
Tpu 95a is quite easy to print, you only need an better extruder setup (thingiverse) to prevent it from going sideways before the bowden tube starts. I’d give it a try before casting parts. My preferred brand is sainsmart Tpu.
Yeah fair point, I’m not a fan of woodwork tbh because I don’t enjoy the very manual or hand drawn aspects of it and I don’t have any equipment beyond sandpaper. It is probably the more sensible choice, just not a skill I’m particularly interested in developing
Ahh ok this sounds fairly sensible, I’ll see what I can find about different silicone products and where I can get my hands on PU. I had thought because of the thickness of a riser that silicone would be a lot stiffer than the thin insulative parts I’ve seen before but I don’t have much to base that on
Imagine risers are at least 80a. I don’t think you’ll find a silicone harder than in the 60s. But why silicone anyway and easiest I think be to3d print the part, make a polyurethane mold, then cast the parts in the same pu but w mold release. Then just have to buy the pu not silicone. N just use Vaseline as mold release.
I feel pretty dumb saying this but something about diy wooden risers just sketches me out because of how short the distance from the truck holes to the edge face will typically be. From a sudden catastrophic failure via crack propagation perspective, especially depending on grain orientation of the wood.
Sort of the same idea as to why psychotiller-esque 3D printed risers/top plates were sketch as fuck. Trucks going into one bad pothole at an angle or whatever could instantly snap a riser of that style and send you into an unrecoverable wobble/quick crash.
BTW. If you have an angle grinder and a drill (+ a little bit of hand filing the channels to smoothness) you can likely make a tunnel riser pretty easily out of aluminum barstock. Not sure about Ireland, but in the US it’s easy enough to find the width & height needed in aluminum stock locally in a Lowes or something.
There seem to be a good number of 80A silicone materials from some Googling, looks like 80 is the limit though. Honestly the reason I went towards silicone is that I thought PU was more of a pain or more dangerous to work with
PU is definitely more temperamental than silicone. Its extremely hydroscopic, so you need to make sure you don’t have the bottles open for any longer than you need them open, and it’s highly advantageous to work in a climate-controlled/humidity-free workspace.
If the PU does manage to absorb water, it goes all foamy during the cure and is pretty much unusable.
Once it’s cured its sweet tho. You can work it as you would timber pretty much, it can be cut, sanded, drilled etc.
The dust is apparently quite bad tho, so respiratory PPE recommended
I was thinking pu mold and cast pu just to be cheapest. Silicone molds are for sure easiest. I just saw some 80 duro. Surprised that hard is out there. For gaskets…which seems pretty much a riser
. It’s a bad idea for enclosures, but I think there is a lot of good applications for it in esk8.
