Tubes – Almost there

In continuation of our Tubes story, we’ve hit several delays and proper celebration of New Year 2023 was one of them. However there were others…

Adapter jig

Initial plan was to have both tubes (50mm and 60mm) as one component and do all tube cladding like that. Seeing how potentially fragile is that heater made me rethink further steps. I assumed that would be much better to do all preparatory works on that 60mm tube only and use the internal heater when needed only. This obviously called for a new set of jigs to allow our thick tube handling.

Practically that meant to develop an adapter which would allow to extend our 60mm tube and plug it into our 50mm wall mount. Bit of OpenSCAD design and couple days of printing worked out nicely.

Wall mount upgrade

Another obstacle appeared when testing the heater. Our current wall-mount made out of ABS didn’t give me enough confidence that it will withstand whole working cycle reaching 150C for 90 minutes. It actually seemed like it started loosing its internal integrity anyway.

Using the graph from arpnjournals below, it is obvious that we can rely on ABS on up to 110C only.

Thinking about which material to pick instead and how to actually make it happen, Serge appeared and offered his help.

A day later we ended up having new wall mounts. 🙂

Material – TR-102 REGULAR PASTE WAX

Checking on all material, we’ve been able to get our hands on, there were few interesting bits. The first one was a mold decoupling wax. Looking around it worked out that the best fix will be for TR-102 REGULAR PASTE WAX from Barnes Australia.

It arrived in an excellent condition – thanks to our sponsor Tam!

Material – Carbon Fiber tape

Next part was to get our hands on a Carbon Fiber tape. I’ve ended up picking 12k 200gsm 4″/10cm width Carbon Fiber Uni-directional Cloth UD Fabric Tap High strength Repair material Tensile strength 3400Mpa. Thinking about it a bit later, I should probably pick bidirectional woven instead, but well we need to start at somewhere.