Projects

Check out our latest project that was successfully funded on Kickstarter!

Perception Engineering Products

The filament safe

As we expanded our 3D printing capabilities we sought to improve printing practices and turned to Kickstarter to help jump start the Filament Safe. After receiving successful funding we were able to ship the Filament Safe to 73 backers. It is now one of our most popular products and have since shipped hundreds of these units and counting. This product can be found in our 3D printing equipment store.

The Filament Safe is built with high quality materials that are both functional in this application and also eye appealing. The clear Acrylic case helps you determine what color and how much material you have remaining without opening the safe. This not only is quick and easy, but also reduces the need to unnecessarily expose your material to a high moisture environment. A large amount of testing has gone into this enclosure to ensure each Filament Safe manufactured meets quality requirements.

The Filament Safe is an airtight container that not only ensures that excessive moisture does not enter your material between prints but can also shorten the material change over time required. 3D printing materials such as ABS, PLA and Nylon are greatly affected by moisture from the environment by which they are stored. Simply leaving a spool of material out overnight in an unsealed container causes the material to absorb moisture and increases the potential for delamination or bubbles in your material. These issues cause inconsistent extrusion widths reducing the finish quality of your prints. Some people have found a solution for this problem by drying their material in an oven or clothes dryer for hours before use, but this is a time consuming process that if not done correctly can cause more harm than good.

The spooler mini

The Spooler Mini is a low cost alternative to the automatic filament winders on the market today. It allows you the control to perfectly wind your own extruded filament onto spools for better storage and easier material handling. The Spooler Mini is engineered as a low cost solution to enable you to easily take the material that you either extruded at home, or purchased unspooled, and wind it quickly while maintaining enough control without the potential of twisting or damaging your filament.

This filament winder is framed with a rigid 14 gauge powder coated steel support, and equipped with three powerful suction cup feet which are able to attach to any clean, flat, smooth surface. The standard size 3D material spool is secured using a locking plate and given a smooth motion by two high quality thrust bearings and a glass filled nylon crank handle.

At Perception Engineering we tested a number of different ways to wind unspooled filament. We started with simply winding the extruded material by hand. This proved to be time consuming since with one slip of the hand the spool would unwind and you would need to start over. The next thought was to wind the material connected to a power drill.  This proved to save on the time required to spool material, however, there was not enough control to ensure that the material wound correctly onto the spool. By using the Spooler Mini, one can quickly wind the desired amount of material with one hand while easily guiding the filament on the spool with the other hand.  This has proven to be a superior manual solution to other methods, and far more cost effective than automatic material winders.