Savage's Fusion Generator

[savagecreature]

I printed in PLA (sorry for the gross color, but I got a good deal on the filament and figured I was going to paint it anyway) with 3 shells all around and an infill of 30%, layer height of .3.

So, after a bunch of printing . . . .

    I got a bunch of the primary parts of the top of the reactor completed. I also seem to have managed to get my finger into frame in every image I took of the parts.  Sorry. :/  But it's just a pile of parts showing that progress is being made, so I figured all of you would forgive me.

Now that I had the parts I needed I could get started on actually assembling.  I did a dry fit on all the pieces and cleaned them to get the best alignment possible. I used a small file to remove any burrs or stringing that printing had left. I glued the slices of the lid together one at a time, starting with no. 1 and working my way counter clockwise when looking at the lid from the bottom. Looking at the bottom of the lid (the only way you can see the numbers) they're arranged like this:

I applied a bead of Gorilla Glue (this is what I used)

along the entire edge of the first segment, . . .

. . . then flipped it over and placed the rim of the piece flat on the table. Then I slid the adjacent piece over into position using the table to maintain alignment between the two pieces.

I then shot it with Zip Kicker to instantly harden the glue.

This Gorilla Glue super glue is stronger than just the regular ole stuff (or at least it seems to be to me), which is why I use it. I'm not patient enough for epoxy. If you're concerned about gluing the parts to your work surface, try putting down some wax paper. That's always worked well for me. It repels super glue and even if it sticks it's not difficult to clean up. When I  lined things up on the table I shot the zip kicker only on the outer edge which would lock that in place but leave the inner seam adjustable to make sure I got the best alignment.

When I had worked my way all the way around the lid I ended up with a gap (and somehow fingers, again, too) and it looked like this:

Even though the gap was fairly large, it wasn't difficult to pull the two sides together to get a proper join.  I applied a bead of glue to the edge again, pulled them together  and placed the whole lid on the work surface to make sure everything aligned and shot it with Zip kicker again.

Ultimately, I had a fully assembled top to go on my fusion generator

I should mention that while I was dry fitting things together I would occasionally grab the wrong piece and put two of them together that weren't in sequential order. (putting 4 and 6 together, say) and I did notice that they . . just . . . didn't . . quite fit the way they were supposed to. I'm sure whatever discrepancies could be sanded out or corrected with filler, etc, since some of that is going to have to be done, anyway, but I stand by my decision to make each slice a distinct file because there was a noticeable difference.