Medium-size Cable Chain/E-Chain/Drag chain for plasma torch etc by lpalbers

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

Needed a bigger cable chain to run cables for servos and plasma torch. IIRC these are about 57mm wide. Mine lock together real well and work great. Not sure if using PLA for these is a good idea because of the flexibility needed to snap them together - I may give it a shot to find out.
Scaled up the original side pieces by 3x, widened it and scaled the connecting pieces (top/bottom) 1.5x vertically.
Initially they worked well enough but felt like they might come apart at any time. I added another protrusion and put a hole in the dimple. Now they lock together real well. Might break getting them together if you use PLA but my ABS ones go together easily and are strong. Infill and shell thickness are also probably part of the reason my first couple seemed to not lock together as well. I am now printing these with .8 shell and 40% infill.
Slicing with cura and the bridge looks a little rough on the bottom but not too bad. Use tweak at Z to turn on the fan for layers 341-342. Supports worked well too and made the underside of the bridge look pretty good, but I am printing a lot of these and don't want to deal with them.
EDIT 11/22/2016 I recently printed a bunch more, this time stitched in simplify3d using supports and printed on makerbot clones and they come out great. Not sure if I used more solid outer lines or infill or what, but they are coming out a lot stiffer and tougher to snap together - but they do still snap together and fit great.