Well, the sun is shining again and there's clear skies to explore!

After resigning myself to not getting the latest and greatest 3D Printer by Makerbot, the Replicator, I was pleased to see a TOM appear on ebay. To my joy and delight I won the bid and this weekend had the chance to put it into action. After an excellent tutorial from Tim, TopperDEL, http://www.thingiverse.com/TopperDEL, the previous owner, I was keen to try something....well astronomy related.

I wanted something simple but still useful and was amazed to find a 3D diagram on thingiverse for an eyepiece cap. The perfect starting point.

This picture shows the Makerbot TOM setup ready to go, well almost, I'm waiting for the temperature to reach 200 . The eyepiece cap is ready and the G-code already created and copied to the printer storage card.

It took 20 mins to print the cap and it fitted very snugly. I would prefer to have a softer plastic so I am looking into printing with a softer, biodegradable plastic.

Cheers
Ivan