
Description
My brother and his friend get spare wax from their beehives but have to pay for the wax foundation with the hexagon pattern. This is an experimental roller set. The commercial ones use a much wider diameter drum pair. My first print of a roller took 24 hours! I have a Rostock delta that can go to around 300mm high so this was one long vertical print. We found that wax was too sticky on the PLA I used. I'd recommend using nylon for the print but then you have to work with nylon's high shrinkage. Ideally a laser powder printer would do a better job for this print. If anyone has success with this, please let me know and I'll amend the instructions. There was also some minor flex that affected the drawing accuracy of the top end cog, a thick brim could have improved that.
Comments (7)
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Has anyone implemented this yet? Please show the photo of the realization.
This rocks! I will try it... can you make 3 versions? Cells come in 5.4, 5.1, and 4.9mm. The smaller is best, but you can’t just jump from big to little.
Is there a place to mount a handle?
the depth of the cells may be too deep to allow good seperation from the wax and the roller. Also how wide are the cells?
Having a biger roller will give a nicer fondation. We use powder nylon printed flat patterns. by adjusting the hexagon size you actually "adjust" the size of bees you get. To get rather big an productive ones or smaller and more resistant bees.
Its also possible to have a gradient of various sized bees in one folk.
Good job!