3D Printing with a Delta WASP 40100 Clay WASP 40100 Clay Printer 

What did you make? thx

I have had this suggested before and have seen it done at the WASP workshop. I just tap the clay container with a metal tool and you can hear where the plunger is by the solid or hollow sound. This is simple and works well. The Cura slicing program also gives an indication of how much material will be used and so I scale work to make sure I can make it in one container or know I will need to pause and refill.

Good thought Daniel, no I haven't. That would be a bit under the bonnet to use the car analogy. I think I will keep to the controls in the driving seat and leave the mechanics under the bonnet to others.

Hi Charlie, more than happy to speak. I'm always interested to know what people are doing with this technology. My contact details are on my website - www.keep-art.co.uk/Contac.html

Found some where you talk about this on another video ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-M2grAyX8sdE.htmlsi=_ktya-4TeoYiFtPC at minute 21

With the compressor, as long as you have no air leeks you use only as much compressed air as the volume of clay that gets extruded and this is not a lot. So one charge or running of the machine running normally lasts me a day. The charging or pumping rate, speed, capacity of the compressor is not that important as long as it will charge/compress up to about 8 Bar of pressure - 8 bar of pressure seems to be the standard health and safety max pressure. I print at around 3 to 5 bar of pressure but as the clay goes hard in the clay container then my extrusion pressure can creep up to 6 bar. The size of the pressure tank is not that important either as even a small tank will keep the pressure constant. Unlike for spray-painting where the air usage is great and then a big tank saves the motor from continually running. Obviously the smaller the tank the more often the machine might come on to keep the pressure at a constant 6 - 8 bar. Most machines you can control at what pressure the machine kicks in to recharge. At a high rate, say 7 bar it kicks in more often than dropping to say 6 bar before a recharge. When getting a compressor there are not too many restrictions and cheap will do but can be noisy. Basically the more you stretch your budget the quieter they are. For ten years I used a cheap Fini Wolfair 2 HP 24 Litre (medium tank) compressor but it is noise. I had it before clay printing for spraying glaze in my ceramic studio. Recently I got myself a quieter Hyundai Super Silent Oil-Free 550W machine with a 8 Litre tank and that works with my large WASP 400100 printer. The Hyundai was set to 7 Bar cut off so I reset that to 8 Bar because it recharges at 2 Bar less to temperature. So now it kicks in for a recharge at 6 Bar rather than 5 Bar. The 5 Bar could be a bit low if you were using hard clay that needed more pressure. I hope this is useful.

@@jkpottery Thank you so much for your in-depth response to my query. It is all very helpful and answered all our questions. Keep up the great work!!